EX    LIBRIS 

THE    UNIVERSITY 

OF    CALIFORNIA 


FROM  THE  FUND 
ESTABLISHED  AT  YALE 

IN  1927  BY 
WILLIAM  H.  CROCKER 

OF  THE  CLASS  OF  1882 

SHEFFIELD  SCIENTIFIC  SCHOOL 

YALE  UNIVERSITY 


THE  REIGN  OF  RELATIVITY 


BY  VISCOUNT  HALDANE 


THE    PHILOSOPHY    OF    HU- 
MANISM  AND  OF  OTHER   SUBJECTS 

THE  PATHWAY  TO  REALITY 

The  Gifford  Lectures  delivered  in  the 
University  of  St.  Andrews.  First  Series, 
1902-3.  Second  Series,  1903-4. 

THE  CONDUCT  OF  LIFE 

AND  OTHER  ADDRESSES. 

UNIVERSITIES  AND 
NATIONAL    LIFE 

Three  Addresses  to  Students. 

HIGHER  NATIONALITY 

A  Study  in  Law  and  Ethics.  An  Address 
delivered  before  the  American  Bar  Asso- 
ciation at  Montreal  on  September  i,  1913. 


LONDON:    JOHN   MURRAY 


THE 


REIGN   OF   RELATIVITY 


BY 
VISCOUNT   HALDANE 


NEW   HAVEN 
YALE   UNIVERSITY   PRESS 
MDCCCCXXII 


FIRST  EDITION May     1921 

SECOND  EDITION  (Issued  only  in  England)  June     1921 

THIRD  EDITION     .....  August  1921 

FOURTH  EDITION  .                         .        .  May      1922 


Printed  in  Great  Britain  by 
Hazell,  Watson  &•  Viney,  Ld.,  London  and  Aylesbury. 


PREFACE  TO  THE  THIRD  EDITION 

IN  this  edition  I  have  in  the  main  made  some  textual 
emendations,  in  themselves  unimportant.  But  at  one 
place  new  matter  of  a  more  serious  kind  has  been  intro- 
duced. Since  the  book  was  written  Professor  Einstein  has 
been  in  London,  and  it  has  been  my  good  fortune  to  have 
had  opportunities  for  conversation  with  him.  The  philo- 
sophical doctrine  of  the  text  of  course  lies  outside  the 
domain  to  which  he  has  confined  himself.  I  have,  how- 
ever, under  the  stimulus  of  my  talk  with  him,  added,  to 
come  in  at  p.  84,  several  fresh  paragraphs  which  develop 
more  definitely  than  was  done  in  the  original  edition  the 
interpretation  which  I  have  put  on  a  basic  principle  in 
modern  mathematical  physics  on  which,  in  agreement  with 
Minkowski,  Einstein  has,  as  it  seems  to  me,  rested  his  reason- 
ing about  relativity.  This  addition  I  have  ventured  to 
make  because  the  point  with  which  it  is  concerned  appears 
to  be  one  belonging  quite  as  much  to  the  theory  of  know- 
ledge as  to  mathematics.  The  language  used  is  my  own 
and  not  Professor  Einstein's,  and  he  is  in  no  way  re- 
sponsible for  my  mode  of  statement.  But  I  have  intro- 
duced nothing  fresh  in  point  of  principle.  I  have  simply 
sought  to  clear  up  what  for  some  readers  has  proved  an 
obscurity,  in  words  which  may  assist  in  rendering  in- 
telligible the  answer  to  a  question  they  have  been  asking. 

HALDANE. 

LONDON, 
July  1921. 


PREFACE 

THE  topics  of  this  book  are  Knowledge  itself  and  the 
relativity  of  reality  to  the  character  of  Knowledge.  Some 
of  the  questions  considered  in  the  book  are  more  than  two 
thousand  years  old.  That  fact  need  not  disturb  us. 
For  there  appears  to  have  been  steady  progress  in  the 
forms  of  the  answers  which  have  gradually  been  evolved. 
If  the  substance  of  these  turns  out  to  be  more  akin  to 
doctrines  originally  produced  by  the  Greeks  than  we  had 
expected  to  find,  that  again  need  not  disturb  us.  It 
would  not  trouble  us  in  the  case  of  literature  or  art, 
and  we  have  to  learn  to  study  philosophy,  and  even  to 
a  considerable  extent  science,  as  we  study  these,  with 
the  circumstances  and  language  of  the  particular  period 
steadily  kept  in  our  view.  To  say  this  does  not  mean 
that  we  are  to  treat  lightly  either  truth  itself  or  the  im- 
perative necessity  for  exactness  in  its  statement.  But  it 
does  mean  that  we  must  have  in  mind  that  truth  in  its 
full  significance  imports  quality  as  much  as  it  imports 
quantity,  and  therefore  variety  in  standard.  We  have 
read  the  history  of  human  endeavour  in  its  many  aspects 
to  little  purpose  if  we  have  not  learned  this. 

The  subject  discussed  involves  reference  to  metaphysical 
inquiry.  I  regret  that  this  has  to  be  so,  for  meta- 
physical discussions  are  not  popular  in  the  world  as  it  is 
at  present.  But  that  world  is  casting  about  in  search  of  a 
basis  on  which  gradually  to  build  up  renewed  faith.  If  it 
continues  in  earnest  in  its  searchings  I  believe  that  it  will 
find  in  the  end  that  it  is  not  possible  to  shirk  encountering 
philosophy  in  some  shape.  I  can  only  say  that  I  have 
tried  to  assist  the  general  reader  to  realise  the  single 
principle  on  which  the  book  is  based  and  built  up,  by 
putting  that  principle  before  him  in  the  variety  of  its 
applications.  I  have  been  fully  aware  that  for  those 

ri 


PREFACE  vii 

specially  trained  in  the  various  branches  of  inquiry 
touched  on  this  has  involved  some  repetition.  But 
the  protean  form  in  which  the  principle  appears  where 
least  expected  afforded  justification  for  my  concern  lest  I 
should  have  failed  at  any  point  to  drag  it  out  for  con- 
tinuous recognition. 

Some  sixteen  years  since,  I  published  Gifford  Lectures, 
delivered  at  the  University  of  St.  Andrews.  These  ap- 
peared in  two  volumes  which  bore  the  title  of  The  Path- 
way to  Reality.  Through  the  two  volumes  there  ran  a 
thread  which  remains  intact  in  the  present  book  :  the 
principle  of  degrees  in  knowledge  and  reality  alike.  But 
since  the  two  volumes  were  written  much  new  knowledge 
has  come  into  existence,  and  the  treatment  has  been 
consequently  refashioned.  The  remarkable  ideas  developed 
by  Einstein,  as  the  result  of  his  investigation  of  the  meaning 
of  physical  measurement,  have  provided  fresh  material  of 
which  philosophy  has  to  take  account.  These,  and  yet 
other  ideas  which  are  affecting  the  scientific  outlook  pro- 
foundly, have  appeared  to  me  to  call  for  a  fresh  route 
of  approach  to  a  view  of  nature  towards  which  philo- 
sophical reflection  was  already  being  impelled.  The 
advantage  which  the  methods  of  science  possess  is  that 
by  them  results  can  be  reached  and  formulated  with  a 
precision  that  is  unrivalled,  so  far  as  they  can  go.  A 
price  for  this  advantage  has,  however,  to  be  paid,  and 
science  is  apt  to  find  itself  in  strange  regions  if  it  does  not 
limit  its  scope  with  genuine  self-denial.  The  inquiry 
entered  on  by  Einstein  has,  perhaps  because  of  the 
presence  to  his  mind  of  something  like  this  reason,  stopped 
short  in  his  hands  of  the  general  problem  of  the  Relativity 
of  all  Knowledge.  The  question  that  remains  is  whether 
the  investigation  of  that  problem  can  be  carried  further, 
and  if  so,  whether  the  philosophical  method  which  appears 
to  be  required  is  a  reliable  one.  The  answer  I  venture 
to  offer  to  the  question  is  contained  in  the  pages  that 
follow. 

The  subject  is  one  that  has  occupied  me  for  many 
years  ;  over  forty,  I  think.  During  much  of  that  period 
I  have  had  other  and  pressing  calls  on  my  time,  calls 
both  of  an  official  and  a  non-official  nature.  But  if  on 
occasions  the  general  significance  of  knowledge  has  had 
to  be  relegated  to  the  background,  it  has  throughout 


viii  PREFACE 

been  in  my  thoughts.  On  the  day  of  my  release  from 
office  as  Lord  Chancellor  in  1915,  I  projected  this  book 
on  Relativity,  and  it  is  now  finished,  for  what  it  is  worth. 
I  part  from  it  as  from  a  child  whom  I  have  watched 
over  and  brought  up,  and  who  has  occupied  a  foremost 
place  in  my  affections.  The  volume,  such  as  it  is,  now 
goes  out  into  a  world  where  it  remains  to  be  seen  whether 
it  will  be  received  well,  or  received  at  all. 

HALDANE. 

LONDON, 
April  1921 


TABLE    OF    CONTENTS 

PART  I— THE  PROBLEM  OF  RELATIVITY 

CHAPTER    I 

INTRODUCTORY 

The  changing  attitude  towards  religion,  politics,  and  literature.  The 
absence  of  settled  conviction  in  the  public  mind  is  the  result  of  reflec- 
tion and  can  be  made  good  only  by  reflection.  There  seems  to  be  no 
reason  for  misgiving.  But  it  is  not  the  less  important  to  seek  out  foun- 
dations on  which  faith  can  be  rested.  These  foundations  must  in  the 
end  be  mainly  spiritual  in  character,  in  the  comprehensive  sense  of  the 
word  "  spiritual,"  and  co-operation  in  the  inquiry  between  the  various 
classes  of  spiritual  reformers  is  therefore  important.  A  great  obstacle 
to  such  co-operation  is  the  sense  that  there  is  little  harmony  between 
the  various  phases  of  knowledge.  Can  such  harmony  be  established  ?  A 
scrutiny  of  the  history  of  reflective  thought,  if  it  makes  more  allowance 
than  is  usual  for  relativity  in  the  standpoints  of  the  different  orders  of 
thinkers,  seems  to  suggest  that  the  great  systems  are  not  really  in  such 
conflict  as  is  currently  imagined.  The  history  of  philosophical  thought 
is  no  record  of  mere  supersession  of  opinions.  It  is  rather  the  exhibition 
of  advance  hi  ideas  which  have  been  antagonistic  mainly  in  their  one- 
sided expression.  If  we  apply  the  historical  method  over  sufficient  periods 
of  time,  we  discover  continuity  in  progress  little  broken,  provided  that 
we  bear  in  mind  the  influence  of  relativity  in  the  successive  standpoints 
which  the  narrative  discloses.  Relativity  of  this  kind  must  always  be 
taken  into  account,  for  it  bears  on  the  real  significance  of  truth.  Truth 
implies  more  than  the  mere  agreement  of  an  idea  with  something  treated 
as  having  an  independent  existence  apart  from  it.  The  test  may  require 
an  adequacy  more  complete,  and  may  have  to  take  account  of  standpoint 
and  include  value  as  well  as  measurement.  .  .  •  pp.  3-15 

CHAPTER    II 

THE   DOMAIN   OF   SCIENCE 

There  is  some  analogy  between  the  methods  of  science  and  those  of 
art,  for  both  require  the  use  of  symbols,  although  their  standpoints  are 
quite  different.  The  disposition  to-day  in  the  domain  of  science  is  to 
search  for  and  detect  unconsciously  made  assumptions.  The  Victorian 
idea  of  reality  as  coming  under  two  distinct  phases,  one  objective  and  self- 
subsistent,  and  the  other  only  subjective  and  for  science  negligible,  is  an 
illustration  of  this  kind  of  assumption.  The  tendency  of  the  new  century 

is 


x  TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

is  to  relegate  that  idea  to  the  lumber-room,  and  to  regard  the  universe  in 
all  its  phases  as  an  entirety.  The  Victorians  really  inherited  their  idea 
from  Locke,  though  Kant  had  partially  superseded  this  idea,  had  they 
but  understood  what  he  did.  Modern  science  looks  on  meaning  as  in- 
separable from  experience.  Kant's  own  shortcomings.  He  still  sought 
to  get  behind  the  final  fact  of  knowledge,  and  this  cannot  be  done.  We 
cannot  resolve  it  into  anything  beyond^  itself ;  we  can  only  observe  and 
study  it  in  its  self -development.  If  we  do  so,  we  find  that  our  perplexities 
have  arisen  from  taking  it  to  be  merely  an  attribute  or  instrument  of  a 
thing  called  a  self.  This  is  an  idea  which  is  only  relatively  admissible, 
and  will  land  us  in  difficulties  if  employed  without  restraint.  The  actual 
character  of  experience.  The  distinction  between  knower  and  known  is 
one  that  truly  falls  within  knowledge.  Each  is  as  real  as  the  other 
within  the  entirety  of  knowledge,  to  which  both  belong.  Knowledge 
as  a  whole  is  itself  the  final  fact  behind  which  we  cannot  get.  But  it 
has  forms  and  stages  within  it  characterised  by  their  relativity. 

pp.  16-32 


CHAPTER   III 

RELATIVITY   AND   WHAT   IT  MEANS 

The  antiquity  of  the  principle  of  relativity.  Its  acceptance  by  modern 
science.  The  far-reaching  importance  of  this  acceptance,  and  the  meeting 
over  it  of  science  with  philosophy.  The  various  meanings  of  relativity. 
The  expression  as  used  in  this  book.  The  real  nature  of  knowledge.  How 
Kant  approached  the  subject.  The  confusion  latent  in  the  question  as 
to  the  origin  of  knowledge.  The  way  in  which  the  principle  of  relativity 
is  now  formulated  by  physicists.  Entities  and  their  relations.  The 
method  of  abstraction  as  employed  in  mathematics.  Why  our  know- 
ledge appears  in  experience  as  conditioned.  Its  early  stages.  Space 
and  time.  Newton  and  Einstein.  All  that  the  physicist  can  actually 
observe  is  variation  and  coincidence  in  the  situations  of  things  relatively 
to  each  other.  Of  force  physics  can  form  no  notion.  The  relative 
character  of  space  and  time.  Coincidences  of  events  as  studied  in  physical 
science.  Events  imply  interpretation  as  essential  to  their  actual  nature, 
and  in  this  sense  and  to  this  extent  are  of  a  mental  character.  The 
relation  of  the  general  to  the  particular  in  knowledge.  What  is  actual 
contains  both,  and  this  is  the  key  to  the  nature  of  knowledge  and  of  its 
object.  The  explanation  applies  in  art  and  in  estimates  of  value  as  much 
as  in  science.  The  ultimate  character  of  knowledge  itself.  pp.  33-50 


CHAPTER   IV 

RELATIVITY   IN   AN   ENGLISH   FORM 

The  revolution  in  physical  conceptions  made  by  Einstein.  Motion  and 
rest.  Gravitation.  The  British  Astronomical  Expedition  of  1919.  The 
basic  controversy.  Inertia  and  Energy.  Diverging  views  about  the 
principle  of  relativity.  Moritz  Schlick.  Whitehead.  The  latter' a 
position  as  a  logician.  The  conclusions  to  which  he  has  brought  himself. 
Analysis  of  his  theory.  "Events"  and  their  "passage."  "Objects." 
The  method  of  "  Extensive  Abstraction."  The  larger  issue  raised  by  the 
fresh  view  of  relativity  set  forth  in  Professor  Whitehead' a  books. 

pp.  51-81 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS  » 

CHAPTER    V 

EINSTEIN 

The  genesis  of  Einstein's  discovery  of  the  special  and  general  principles 
of  relativity  in  physics.  Measurement.  The  elimination  of  force  as  a 
concept  in  physics.  Action  at  a  distance.  The  relation  of  phenomena  as 
observed  to  the  space-time  continuum.  The  "  world-line,"  and  the  in- 
separability in  it  of  the  spatial  from  the  temporal.  The  significance  of 
Einstein's  physical  theories  for  philosophy.  The  metaphysics  of  Tensors. 
Euclidean  space.  Professor  Eddington's  suggestions  about  the  relation  of 
mind  to  nature.  Comparison  with  the  Hamiltonian  theory  of  Representative 
Perception.  The  ultimate  physical  basis.  Riemann,  Freundlich,  and 
Schlick  on  the  ultimate  ground  of  the  continuum.  Contrast  with  the  views  of 
Professor  Whitehead.  The  controversy  is  superseded  if  we  cease  to  hypo- 
statise  nature  into  something  of  a  different  character  from  mind,  and  give 
up  insisting  on  disjoining  particular  from  universal  in  our  experience.  Rela- 
tion to  mind  is  essential  for  the  existence  of  nature,  for  apart  from  such 
a  relation  congruence  would  be  unintelligible.  Professor  Whitehead' a 
logical  methods  seem  to  guide  him  towards  this  result.  It  constitutes  a 
difference  between  his  view  and  the  merely  physical  theory  of  Einstein, 
and  the  question  the  former  raises  is  inevitable.  It  really,  however, 
belongs  to  the  domain  of  philosophy.  Bergson  on  the  spatialisation  of 
time  and  the  fourth  dimension.  Gauss,  Riemann,  and  Minkowski  at 
Gottingen.  The  doctrine  of  relativity  in  physical  measurement  leaves 
several  questions  to  be  answered,  including  one  as  to  the  character  of 
the  universe  in  which  we  have  our  place.  It  opens  up  possibilities  of 
knowledge  of  a  new  kind pp.  82-122 


CHAPTER    VI 

RELATIVITY   IN   EXPERIENCE   GENERALLY 

Einstein's  principle  of  the  relativity  of  measurement  in  space  and  time 
cannot  be  taken  as  isolated.  It  has  its  counterpart  in  the  other  domains 
of  nature  and  of  knowledge.  For,  however  we  may  interpret  it,  there 
remains  before  us  the  basic  principle  that  knowledge  everywhere  enters 
into  reality  with  transforming  power.  Illustrations  from  biology.  The 
meaning  of  "  cause  "  ;  its  relation  to  the  concept  of  "  end."  The  con- 
trast between  end  and  conscious  purpose  in  the  intelligent  organism. 
The  doctrine  of  degrees  or  levels  in  reality  and  knowledge,  and  of  their 
relations  to  each  other.  All  the  sciences  belong  to  one  entirety,  and  all 
their  methods  are  required  for  the  interpretation  of  experience.  What 
science  owes  to  philosophy.  It  turns  out  that  observer  and  observed 
everywhere  stand  as  inseparable  in  fact  as  well  as  in  logic.  Knowledge 
is  of  differing  kinds,  and  what  determines  these  kinds  is  the  standards 
employed.  They  belong  to  different  orders,  as  we  find  in  the  observation 
of  a  mind  or  a  living  organism  when  contrasted  with  the  observation  of 
a  machine.  The  conception  employed  takes  the  place  in  the  former  of 
the  co-ordinates  of  reference  used  in  the  case  of  the  latter.  Mind,  when 
the  abstractions  we  make  are  allowed  for,  includes  the  whole  of  these 
within  its  entirety.  The  inherent  tendency  of  knowledge  towards  self- 
completion.  Illustrations  of  this  tendency.  The  full  explanation  has 
always  in  the  end  to  be  from  above  downwards.  The  true  character  of 


xii  TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

mind,  and  the  way  in  which  knowledge  becomes  relative.  The  finite  self 
and  the  object- world  from  which  it  is  distinguished.  The  outlook  is  really 
larger  than  that  in  which  realism  is  differentiated  from  idealism.  It  is 
in  consequence  of  abstractions  made  to  serve  practical  purposes  that  the 
limited  forms  of  knowledge  arise.  The  meaning  of  truth.  Knowledge 
is  something  more  than  an  instrument  applied  ab  extra,  and  its  various 
forms  require  investigation  in  detail  of  appropriate  kinds.  pp.  123-146 


PART   II— THE   METAPHYSICAL   FOUNDATION 
OF   RELATIVITY 

CHAPTER   VII 

THE   SELF   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

My  knowledge  of  myself  as  included  in  my  object-world  is  a  fact  as 
obvious  as  it  is  extraordinary.  The  difficulty  in  understanding  it  arises 
from  my  having  taken  my  mind  to  be  a  thing  of  which  my  knowledge  is 
a  property.  This  cannot  be  true,  for  the  distinction  of  my  mind  from 
its  object  appears  on  scrutiny  to  be  the  result  of  reflection  from  a  partial 
standpoint.  I  turn  out  to  be  more  than  at  first  sight  I  took  myself  to 
be.  In  my  experience  subject  and  object  are  never  separated,  but  are 
at  every  point  mutually  implied.  They  are  not  independent  entities,  but 
the  outcome  of  points  of  view  which  may  be  only  relatively  true.  These 
give  me  different  kinds  of  objects,  and  of  concepts  through  which  they 
are  interpreted.  When  I  say  "  I  "  the  concept  employed  is,  and  must 
be,  of  the  character  of  a  universal,  and  of  general  application.  For  other 
men  say  "  I "  with  identically  the  same  meaning.  Their  bodies  and 
experiences  and  histories  are  different  from  mine,  and  in  respect  of  these 
we  are  independent  beings.  But  we  think  correspondingly  in  a  corre- 
spondence that  is  based  on  identity  in  concepts.  These  are  not  occur- 
rences in  time,  but  are  the  very  same  thoughts  despite  their  differences 
in  detail.  Reality  itself  and  the  distinction  between  dreams  and  appre- 
hension of  what  is  actual  depend  on  this.  The  relation  of  knowledge  to 
my  organism.  I  know  what  other  people  feel  only  by  knowing  what  they 
think.  Interpretation  through  concepts.  The  Leibnitzian  monad.  The 
meaning  of  the  identity  of  the  world  we  all  perceive.  Mind  and  body 
represent,  not  different  entities,  but  different  orders  in  experience.  The 
unreality  of  both  universal  and  particular  when  taken  in  isolation.  The 
real  is  individual  and  never  static.  The  relation  of  personality  to  organic 
life.  The  finite  centre.  The  range  of  reflection  is  unlimited,  notwith- 
standing that  my  mind  is  conditioned  by  having  to  express  itself  in  my 
organism.  I  am  no  mere  object  in  an  external  nature.  The  character 
of  the  self,  and  the  interpretation  of  its  finiteness.  The  tendency  of 
experience  towards  self-completion.  Mind  finds  mind  even  in  forms  that 
have  aspects  belonging  to  externality.  .  .  .  pp.  149-172 

CHAPTER    VIII 

MEANING   AS   ENTERING   INTO   REALITY 

The  "  I,"  with  my  reference  of  my  experience  to  it,  is  the  foundation 
of  congruence  in  the  various  forms  of  that  experience.  The  difficulty 
felt  in  accepting  this  view  arises  from  the  tendency  to  separate  the  self 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS  xiii 

from  the  object- world  in  its  knowledge.  We  have  to  do  this  for  practical 
purposes,  but  the  interpretation  so  obtained  is  only  relatively  true. 
The  differentiations  made  within  the  entirety  of  knowledge.  The  mean- 
ing of  finiteness  as  characterising  the  self.  Symbolism.  Summary  of 
the  position  reached  in  the  discussion.  The  terminology  of  metaphysics. 
How  meaning  is  essential  for  reality.  The  necessity  of  adequate  concepts 
for  the  apprehension  of  the  real.  The  principle  of  degrees.  How 
knowledge  itself  must  be  studied.  The  view  put  forward  is  really 
no  new  one,  but  as  old  as  Greek  philosophy.  Truth  and  value.  The 
differences  between  individuals.  To  imagine  that  there  can  be 
numerically  different  universes  is  to  imagine  what  is  meaningless.  For 
knowledge  depends  on  identity  of  the  concepts  in  which  any  universe 
arises.  Knowledge  is  no  arbitrary  procedure.  It  unfolds  its  own  char- 
acter. There  is  no  properly  statable  problem  of  the  genesis  of  know- 
ledge, and  reality  is  always  conceptual,  and  of  the  character  of  a  concrete 
universal  in  which  a  relation  of  object  to  subject  is  implied. 

pp.  173-192 


CHAPTER    IX 

APPEARANCE   AND   REALITY 

It  is  only  metaphorically  that  we  can  speak  of  nature  as  closed  to 
mind.  Our  intelligence  is  presented  as  finite  and  as  confronted  by  nature, 
but  that  intelligence  turns  out  to  be  more  than  it  takes  itself  to  be,  and 
to  this  fact  the  principle  of  degrees  is  the  key.  The  character  of  finite 
knowledge.  The  implications  of  the  conception  of  personality.  Our 
point  of  departure  is  the  "  this,"  in  which  we  are  here  and  now,  but  it 
is  only  a  point  of  departure  for  the  activity  of  reflection,  although  the 
world  is  there  independently  of  our  particular  minds.  The  beginning 
in  time  of  knowledge.  The  treatment  of  thought  in  books  on  logic. 
The  full  character  of  thought,  and  its  tendency  to  search  for  the  whole. 
Criticism  of  the  views  of  Mr.  F.  H.  Bradley,  Professor  Bosanquet,  and 
Professor  Pringle-Pattison.  Cardinal  Newman.  The  Hegelian  "  Phe- 
nomenology." Summary  of  the  chapter — The  meaning  of  divine 
immanence.  Relativity  in  this  connection.  •  •  .  pp.  193-219 


CHAPTER    X 

MANIFOLD   ORDERS   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

In  the  same  individual  phenomenon  there  are  present  a  variety  of 
degrees  in  knowledge.  Our  thinking  takes  place  by  imagery,  in  which 
multitudinous  concepts  are  implicit.  The  consideration  of  what  we  pass 
by  as  merely  inorganic  nature  illustrates  this.  Symbols.  The  use  and 
abuse  of  metaphor.  The  difficulty  of  its  employment  in  philosophy, 
although  that  employment  is  unavoidable.  The  example  of  our  language 
about  death.  The  view  of  the  self  required  for  the  doctrine  of  degrees. 
Evolution.  Darwin  free  from  the  characteristic  failing  of  the  Victorians. 
Knowledge  and  instinct.  The  dialectical  tendency  in  explanation.  Goethe. 
Mysticism.  What  we  presuppose  in  our  knowledge.  The  hypostatisa- 
tion  of  conceptions  into  images  supposed  to  be  exhaustively  descriptive. 
The  far-reaching  influence  of  relativity.  Illustration  from  the  controversy 


xiv  TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

about  free-will.  The  doctrine  of  degrees  lays  many  spectral  appear- 
ances. All  adequate  explanation  is  from  the  concrete  to  the  abstract, 
and  from  above  to  below pp.  220-239 


PART  III— OTHER  VIEWS  ABOUT  THE  NATURE 
OF    THE   REAL 

CHAPTER    XI 

GREEK   PHILOSOPHY 

The  temptation  to  read  too  much  into  Greek  Philosophy.  One  of  its 
attractions  is  its  freedom  from  modern  obsessions.  Its  abiding  character. 
Its  deliverance  from  the  difficulty  which  has  led  in  modern  times  to  the 
separation  of  knower  from  known,  and  to  subjective  idealism.  Aristotle's 
relation  to  Plato.  Form  and  matter.  The  relation  of  the  principle  of 
Becoming  in  Aristotle  to  the  doctrine  of  degrees.  The  obscurities  in  his 
presentation  of  his  principle,  and  the  consequent  divergences  between  his 
commentators.  But  Aristotle  did  insist  that  the  relation  between  per- 
cipient and  perceived  was  the  creation  of  knowledge  itself.  He  was  not 
embarrassed  by  the  modern  tendency  to  reduce  all  conceptions  to  those 
of  externality  and  cause  and  substance.  The  principle  of  degrees  is 
implied  in  his  system.  The  De  Anima  and  the  Metaphysics.  His  view 
of  mind.  The  price  we  have  paid  for  getting  beyond  Aristotle,  and 
the  defects  of  his  view  of  the  world.  Knowledge  as  foundational  in  his 
system.  The  conflict  of  views  in  it  about  Logic  and  Metaphysics.  Com- 
parison between  the  systems  of  Aristotle  and  Plotinus.  The  personality 
of  the  latter.  Neither  ever  got  rid  of  a  certain  tendency  to  dualism. 
The  great  value  to  us  of  Greek  thought  is  its  insistence  that  no  view  is 
sufficient  which  excludes  any  important  aspect  in  which  reality  and  the 
truth  about  it  can  be  presented.  The  ethical  shortcoming  of  Hellenism. 

pp.  243-264 


CHAPTER   XII 

NEW   REALISM 

The  effort  of  New  Realism  to  confine  itself  to  the  methods  of  science. 
The  various  schools  of  New  Realists  agree  in  attributing  self -subsistence 
apart  from  knowledge  to  a  non-mental  world.  Differences  in  the  views 
of  these  schools.  The  domination  in  New  Realism  of  the  category  of 
substance.  The  inclusion  of  universals  in  the  non-mental  world.  Its 
view  of  consciousness.  The  barrier  it  puts  in  the  path  of  subjective 
idealism.  Professor  Alexander.  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell  on  the  relations 
between  logic  and  mathematics.  Number.  The  possible  relation  of  New 
Realism  to  biology.  Ought  not  the  New  Realists  in  consistency  to  claim 
that  morals,  beauty,  and  religion  also  all  of  them  belong  to  the  non- mental 
world  ?  Is  not  the  distinction  between  this  and  the  mental  world  a  dis- 
appearing one,  and  have  they  not  proved  too  much  ?  What  mind 
really  is pp.  265-291 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS  xv 

CHAPTER    XIII 

REALISM   AND   IDEALISM 

The  deflection  of  the  view  of  New  Realism  about  reality  has  its  parallel 
in  that  of  Subjective  Idealism,  with  consequent  aspects  due  to  relativity 
in  outlook.  How  Locke  was  led  into  a  snare  by  a  metaphor.  His  view 
of  mind  as  a  thing  and  of  knowledge  as  an  instrument.  Epistemology 
and  the  "  two  substance "  theory.  Berkeley  was  launched  in  conse- 
quence on  a  slippery  slope,  down  which  Hume  conducted  philosophy 
to  a  precipice.  They  all  three  treated  mind  as  "  substance."  Thomas 
Reid's  great  service  in  rejecting  the  doctrine  of  "  representative  percep- 
tion." "  Common  sense"  as  he  conceived  it.  Kant  carried  the  criticism 
of  the  "  substance  "  doctrine  still  further.  His  view  of  knowledge.  It  is 
presupposed  in  all  experience.  His  limited  conception  of  the  categories 
and  of  space  and  time.  The  Critique  of  Judgment.  The  revolution  in 
thought  which  Kant  effected.  The  defects  in  his  system.  The  diverging 
attitudes  of  the  schools  which  succeeded  him.  The  possibility  of  access 
to  the  "  thing-in-itself "  through  direct  awareness.  Schopenhauer. 
The  reasons  why  he  founded  no  school.  His  personality.  His  system. 
His  relation  to  Bergson's  principle.  The  real  divergence  of  the  latter 
from  Kant.  The  true  nature  of  mobility.  It  is  against  the  limitations 
of  Kant's  mechanistic  view  of  the  categories  that  Bergson's  great  point 
is  really  made.  His  originality  in  the  statement  of  this.  He  actually 
relies  on  intelligence  and  assumes  it  as  presupposed  in  his  view  of  reality. 
An  American  critic  of  Bergson.  "Creative  finalism."  Time.  The 
relation  of  Bergson  to  Bradley pp.  292-316 


CHAPTER   XIV 

AN   AMERICAN   CRITICISM   OF   BERGSON 

Notwithstanding  the  open-minded  detachment  of  Bergson,  he  does 
not  free  himself  from  the  dominating  influence  of  his  peculiar  view  of  the 
character  of  reality.  It  is  difficult  in  reading  him  to  feel  that  the  actual, 
as  he  presents  it,  has  meaning  apart  from  knowledge.  His  view  of  time. 
Professor  Watts  Cunningham  on  this.  Hegel  on  time.  For  Professor 
Cunningham  teleology  is  no  inadequate  category,  and  it  implies  time  as 
a  genuine  form  of  reality,  although  there  is  a  meaning  in  which  time 
is  transcended  in  a  fuller  entirety.  The  "coherence"  doctrine,  and 
Professor  Bosanquet's  exposition  of  it.  His  relation  in  this  reference 
to  Mr.  Bradley.  The  world  of  ends  ....  pp.  317-332 


CHAPTER   XV 

THE   HEGELIAN   PRINCIPLE 

Schopenhauer  and  Bergson  chose  one  branch  of  the  path  which  diverged 
from  where  Kant  halted.  They  sought  to  reach  the  thing-in-itself  through 
direct  awareness.  Criticism  has,  however,  tended  to  insist  on  this  being 
only  a  fresh  form  of  knowledge.  Hegel  denied  the  reality  of  the  thing- 


xvi  TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

in-itself,  and  sought  to  get  rid  of  the  limited  interpretation  of  the  nature 
of  knowledge  which  had  forced  Kant  to  postulate  that  notion.  In  dis- 
cussing Hegel's  method  it  is  necessary  to  begin  by  pointing  out  what  it 
was  not,  for  most  of  the  current  ideas  about  it  are  misinterpretations, 
arising  partly  from  accepting  second-hand  information  from  would-be 
interpreters.  If  we  turn  to  Hegel  himself  the  first  thing  we  find  is  that 
he  did  not  treat  things  as  created  by  our  thinking  about  them.  Nor 
did  he  even  set  up  the  Prussian  Constitution  as  an  ideal,  or  as  more  than 
a  fact  to  be  investigated.  Other  reasons  which  have  led  to  the  current 
misinterpretation  of  Hegel  are  the  circumstance  that  after  his  death 
his  school  split  itself  into  fragments,  and  also  the  unattractiveness  of  his 
personality.  His  character.  His  terminology  and  his  curious  pedantry, 
which  is  the  outcome  of  his  systematic  effort  after  accuracy  in  expression. 
The  alternative  path  to  that  of  Schopenhauer  and  others  which  he  selected 
was  a  resolute  attempt  to  discover  a  wider  meaning  of  knowledge  than 
Kant  had  attributed  to  it.  He  sought  to  explain  the  feature  of  its  rela- 
tivity by  observing  it  in  its  self-development.  Its  dynamic  activity  he 
called  the  Begriff,  and  its  self-completing  system  he  named  the  "  Idea." 
The  individual  was  always  concrete,  and  to  be  actual  was  for  him  to  be 
concrete  and  individual  in  form.  No  system  of  universals,  taken  per  se, 
could  for  him  be  real,  any  more  than  a  merely  objective  world  of  par- 
ticulars could  exist  dissociated  from  intelligence.  Concrete  experience 
was  the  true  form  of  the  actual,  and  it  was  the  work  of  mind  in  this  that 
had  to  be  studied.  The  "  Phenomenology  of  Mind  "  ;  its  scheme.  The 
antithesis  of  "  Logic  "  and  "  Nature  "  as  two  counter-abstractions,  each 
of  which  involves  the  other  and  is  real  only  in  experience.  Here  the 
principle  of  degrees  is  everywhere  apparent.  His  historical  method  and 
his  vast  learning.  His  attempt  to  exhibit  the  entire  universe  in  syste- 
matic form  was  too  ambitious.  It  is  the  spirit  rather  than  the  letter 
of  Hegelianism  that  is  still  important.  His  influence  in  Great  Britain 
and  America  and  India  is  to-day  much  more  alive  than  it  is  in  Germany. 
Exposition  of  his  point  of  view,  Knowledge  is  our  "  That "  ;  we  start 
from  it  and  never  get  beyond  it.  Thought  and  feeling.  Identity  in 
difference.  Thought  is  for  Hegel  more  than  merely  relational.  The 
nature  of  the  self.  The  ideal  of  knowledge.  The  resemblance  of  his 
view  of  the  object- world  to  that  of  Aristotle.  Substance,  cause  and 
effect.  The  categories  are  abstractions,  and  they  form  the  subject  of 
his  "  Logic,"  which  is  really  a  Metaphysic.  The  various  aspects  pre- 
sented by  mind.  God  is  immanent,  and  experience  rightly  interpreted 
is  for  Hegel  reality  revealing  itself.  The  finite  aspects  of  mind  it  derives 
through  nature.  His  method  is  what  is  interesting  to-day,  and  it  must 
still  be  studied pp.  333-348 


PART   IV— THE   INDIVIDUAL    AND   HIS 
ENVIRONMENT 

CHAPTER    XVI 

THE   RELATION   OF   MAN   TO   SOCIETY 

Knowledge  is  not  merely  theory ;   it  is  action  in  which  we  are  likewise 
free.    We  can  select  among  values,  which  are  not  dependent  on  us  indi- 


TABLE   OF  CONTENTS  xvii 

vidually.  These  also  belong  to  the  foundational  character  of  mind,  and 
exhibit  degrees  among  themselves.  The  nature  of  the  universal  moment 
which  they  disclose.  The  failure  of  Hedonism.  The  Good  belongs  to 
the  region  of  the  free  person.  Conscience  contrasted  with  law.  Their 
characters.  The  contrast  of  both  with  Sittlichkeit  or  "  good  form."  This 
last  is  the  most  prominent  source  of  freedom  within  a  civilised  community. 
It  depends  on  general  outlook  and  purpose.  There  may  appear  anti- 
nomies between  morality  and  law  on  the  one  hand,  and  "  good  form  " 
on  the  other.  In  the  larger  outlook  these  are  resolved.  This  outlook 
discloses  man  as  no  static  entity  but  as  a  dynamic  subject.  Identity  in 
ends,  as  in  knowledge  generally.  The  choice  between  ends  is  influenced 
by  the  distinction  between  values,  which  may  prove  to  be  final.  Their 
quality  cannot  be  determined  by  reference  to  any  subordinate  standards. 
The  average  levels  of  groups  of  individuals.  The  value  of  man  as  a 
rational  being  turns  on  his  capacity  to  rise  above  what  is  external  or 
biological,  and  to  be  a  citizen  in  a  realm  of  ends  that  are  unquestionable. 
The  shadow  of  self.  The  lesson  inculcated  by  Goethe  in  the  second  part 
of  Faust pp.  351-386 


CHAPTER   XVII 

THE   INDIVIDUAL  AND   THE   STATE 

The  real  nature  of  the  General  Will.  The  difficulty  in  admitting  its 
existence  arises  from  the  assumption  that  the  self  is  atomic.  The  basis 
of  its  reality  is  correspondence  arising  from  identity  in  conception  and 
purpose.  The  General  Will  is  thus  no  entity  independent  of  the  private 
will,  but  is  the  latter  at  a  different  level.  It  is  no  sum  of  private  wills. 
The  standpoint  in  social  purpose  is  what  is  important.  The  character 
of  sovereignty  within  the  state.  The  controversy  between  Monists  and 
Pluralists.  The  mere  question  of  legality  is  not  decisive  here.  The 
Church  or  the  Trade  Union  may  prove  too  strong  to  permit  freedom 
to  the  Government  in  the  exercise  of  theoretical  capacity.  The  true 
source  of  sovereignty  is  the  sanction  of  general  opinion.  The  illusory 
character  of  the  decisions  at  the  ballot-boxes.  The  difficulties  experienced 
in  consequence  by  the  Ministers  who  have  to  interpret  their  own  man- 
date. A  real  majority  rule  is  different  from  mob  rule.  The  position  of 
the  Crown  in  the  British  Constitution.  Bacon  and  Paley.  The  Judges 
co-operate  with  Members  of  Parliament  in  securing  that  the  exercise  of 
theoretical  power  is  kept  within  the  boundaries  of  the  national  mandate. 
The  influence  of  tradition  and  the  utility  of  "  red  tape."  The  nature  of 
a  nation  and  the  true  foundation  of  the  sovereignty  which  lies  behind 
legality.  In  what  sense  the  state  itself  is  subject  to  obligations  towards 
other  states.  The  idea  of  a  League  of  Nations.  There  are  levels  in 
human  purpose  higher  than  that  at  which  the  interests  of  the  state 
appear  as  final  ends.  The  reality  that  is  larger  than  that  of  the  state. 

pp.  367-381 


2 


xviii  TABLE   OF  CONTENTS 


PART   V—THE  HUMAN  AND   THE  DIVINE 
CHAPTER    XVIII 

THE   RELATION   OF   MAN   TO   GOD 

The  lesson  learned  from  the  study  of  the  relation  of  Man  to  the  State. 
The  present  problem  is  not  different  in  character.  The  conception  of 
God  as  no  entity  separated  from  ourselves.  He  can  be  no  far-away 
Absolute  whose  nature  is  to  be  a  totum  simul ;  no  substance,  nor  yet 
subject  differentiated  from  its  object.  He  must  be  the  entirety,  to  which 
the  principle  of  relativity  points  ;  mind  as  foundational  and  in  its  com- 
pleteness. We  are  more  than  we  take  ourselves  to  be  from  our  particular 
standpoints.  Can  we  work  out  such  a  conception  adequately  ?  If  we 
regard  God  as  immanent  we  can  get  some  way  at  all  events  towards 
doing  so.  Man's  knowledge  and  God's  knowledge.  The  use  in  this  con- 
nection of  the  principle  of  degrees.  The  true  character  of  knowledge. 
Why  the  Hegelian  attempt  at  the  exhibition  of  an  exhaustive  system  was 
too  ambitious.  Goethe's  testimony  to  the  power  of  Art  in  this  connec- 
tion. The  language  of  Jesus.  The  use  of  religion.  The  light  thrown 
on  the  nature  of  the  self.  Time.  Not  a  mind  but  mind.  Analogues. 
The  necessity  for  knowledge  in  addition  to  emotion.  "  Man  never  knows 
how  anthropomorphic  he  is."  Our  metaphors.  Thought  is  more  than 
merely  relational.  In  the  effort  after  truth  we  experience  its  real  nature. 

pp.  385-404 


CHAPTER    XIX 

ETERNAL   LIFE 

The  significance  of  the  ideal  of  self-completion  implied  in  our  know- 
ledge of  God  as  immanent  in  us.  Even  if  not  accomplished  in  our  par- 
ticular experience  this  ideal  is  a  shaping  end.  It  stands  for  the  entirety 
within  which  must  fall  every  standpoint  from  which  mind  directs  itself. 
Analogies  and  illustrations.  The  relationships  between  human  beings  are 
those  of  spirit  to  spirit.  How  this  bears  on  the  fact  of  death.  What 
is  really  desired  in  the  form  of  life  beyond  the  grave.  Spiritualism  falls 
short  of  it.  The  deeper  sense  hi  which  death  loses  its  reality.  The 
value  of  images  and  metaphors  in  this  connection.  Art  and  religion ; 
their  relation  to  philosophy.  The  application  of  the  principle  of  rela- 
tivity. The  undertaker  and  the  executor.  The  true  significance  of 
the  idea  of  life  as  beyond  the  all-severing  wave  of  time,  and  of  the  symbols 
in  which  this  is  expressed.  ......  pp.  405-420 


CHAPTER   XX 

CONCLUDING   REFLECTIONS 

Summing  up  of  the  result  of  the  inquiry.     The  bearing  of  that  result 
on  practical  life.     The  necessity  of  educating  the  mind  of  a  nation,  and 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS  xix 

the  variety  essential  in  such  education.  The  leadership  required  for  the 
guidance  of  the  teachers  and  for  the  harmony  of  their  work.  Democracy. 
The  seriousness  of  purpose  really  apparent  since  the  war.  The  advantages  of 
the  reflective  habit.  Burke  on  human  nature.  The  progress  in  national 
standards.  The  mind  of  the  State  no  more  stands  still  than  does  the 
mind  of  the  individual.  Its  outlook  is  governed  by  relativity.  The 
principle  of  relativity  teaches  us  that  there  are  different  orders  in  which 
both  our  knowledge  and  the  reality  it  seeks  have  differing  forms,  and  that 
we  must  be  critical  of  ourselves  when  we  attempt  to  bring  categories  to 
bear.  This  is  a  lesson  of  high  importance  for  practice.  Its  value  in 
enlarging  our  outlook  on  life.  .....  pp.  421-431 

INDEX pp.  432-434 


PART    I 
THE   PROBLEM   OF   RELATIVITY 


CHAPTER   I 

INTRODUCTORY 

i 

Preliminary.     The  practical  problem.     Its  scope.     The  ambiguity  in  the 
Meaning  of  Truth. 

ONE  of  the  results  following  on  the  Great  War  has  been 
an  increased  disposition  to  scrutinise  opinion  about 
religion.  What  is  sometimes  called  "  authority "  does 
not  count  for  what  it  did.  Questions  are  being  raised 
with  a  freedom  that  is  fresh  about  the  formulas  which 
express  the  various  kinds  of  faith.  Men  and  women  appear 
to  be  looking  to-day  to  the  spirit  more  than  to  the  letter. 
Precision  in  theological  statement  is  no  longer  held  to  be 
of  high  importance,  and  abstract  principles  are  not  being 
given  a  great  place  in  the  creeds.  Even  as  to  the  prospect 
of  a  life  beyond  the  grave,  the  people  do  not  concern 
themselves  in  the  old  way.  The  pictorial  representa- 
tions of  such  a  life  are  passing  largely  into  the  hands  of 
others  than  ministers  of  religion;  for  example,  of  the 
spiritualists.  The  learned  classes,  including  those  among 
the  clergy  themselves  who  are  learned,  are  becoming 
more  absorbed  in  the  idea  of  an  eternal  life  that  can  be 
lived  here  and  now,  and  is  beyond  the  reach  of  the  all- 
severing  wave  of  time.  If  for  them  the  grave  continues 
to  have  no  victory,  it  is  from  a  new  standpoint  that  death 
has  lost  its  sting.  What  seems  to  move  people  is  quality 
rather  than  quantity.  If  the  once  famous  question, 
"  Are  we  still  Christians  ?  "  put  by  David  Strauss  nearly 
fifty  years  ago  in  The  Old  Faith  and  the  New,  were  again 
raised  in  these  times,  it  seems  unlikely  that  the  question 
would  cause  great  commotion  in  the  mind  of  the  man  in 
the  street. 

In  public  affairs,  too,  marked  changes  in  attitude  are 
in  operation.  Not  only  here  but  on  the  Continent  various 
forms  of  political  idealism  are  exercising  far-reaching 

3 


4  INTRODUCTORY 

influence.  About  such  idealism  there  is  much  indefinite- 
ness  of  thought.  Many  of  those  who  range  themselves 
on  its  side  do  so,  not  from  enthusiasm  about  a  programme, 
but  from  the  desire  of  an  inspiration  which  they  have 
ceased  to  find  in  the  politics  of  the  generation  that  is 
passing  away.  What  the  basis  of  their  new  political  faith 
is  to  be  they  can  tell  but  vaguely.  This  age  is  one  indeed 
of  democracy,  but  not  of  democracy  concentrated  on  any 
plan  of  reform  that  is  universally  or  even  generally 
accepted. 

Nor  is  it  only  in  the  spheres  of  religion  and  of  public 
life  that  a  growing  change  in  public  opinion  is  becoming 
manifest.  In  literature  and  in  art  new  tendencies  are 
obvious.  The  days  in  which  stress  was  laid  on  a  high 
level  in  reflection  appear  for  the  time  at  least  to  be  over. 
The  names  of  the  great  reflective  poets  are  associated  with 
a  period  the  work  of  which  is  ceasing  to  satisfy  current 
taste.  Expression  as  an  end  in  itself,  rather  than  as 
suggestive  of  insight,  seems  now  to  be  what  counts  for 
most.  The  average  of  quality  in  expression  is  high,  but 
the  restriction  of  its  significance  has  for  a  consequence 
that  peaks  and  pinnacles  are  no  longer  conspicuous.  The 
poets  are  not  our  leaders  to-day  in  the  fashion  in  which 
they  used  to  be. 

These  and  other  features  of  the  period  in  which  we 
live  are  illustrative  of  changes  in  disposition  that  appear 
to  be  coming  over  the  men  and  women  of  our  time. 
Not  only  are  settled  convictions  less  apparent,  but  the 
motive-power  which  generally  attends  such  convictions 
is  no  longer  displayed  in  the  old  fashion.  The  loss  is  a 
considerable  one.  But  there  is  neither  profit  to  be  found 
in  lamentation  nor  is  there  a  royal  road  to  a  remedy. 
The  gap  in  the  foundations  of  the  old  beliefs  has  been 
largely  the  result  of  reflection,  and  it  is  not  by  the  stimu- 
lation of  emotion,  but  only  in  further  reflection,  that 
there  can  be  hope  of  filling  it  up.  No  intensity  of  merely 
personal  conviction  can  be  put  for  this  purpose  in  the 
place  of  conclusions  based  on  reasoned  knowledge.  For 
subjective  certainty  will  always  in  the  future  be  what 
it  has  been  in  the  past,  individual  and  only  imperfectly 
communicable. 

Now  it  must  not  be  hastily  assumed  that  the  attitude 
of  the  day  to  such  subjects  as  religion,  politics,  and 


THE  NEW  ATTITUDE  5 

literature  is  one  that,  from  the  highest  outlook,  we  ought 
to  regret.  If  that  attitude  has  brought  loss  in  some 
things,  it  is  bringing  gain  in  others.  Much  wheat  is  being 
separated  from  the  chaff  which  our  predecessors  accepted 
in  vast  quantities  with  their  wheat.  Great  progress  is 
taking  place  in  science.  The  average  is  high  in  literature. 
If  there  is  absence  of  conspicuously  outstanding  prophets, 
the  taught  are  not  separated  from  their  teachers  by  the 
wide  intervals  of  the  days  that  once  were.  The  best 
students  know  so  much  that  it  is  no  longer  possible  that 
any  professor  should  impose  on  them  by  the  mere  authority 
of  his  position.  His  authority  they  will  recognise,  but, 
where  they  do  so,  on  other  grounds.  The  general  stan- 
dards of  intelligence  are  rapidly  rising.  And  if  we  look 
in  a  different  direction,  towards  the  capacities  of  nations 
as  distinguished  from  individuals,  no  war  was  ever  fought 
with  such  concentration  of  national  effort  as  the  history 
of  the  recent  war  records.  The  daring  displayed  and 
the  knowledge  applied,  not  least  in  the  ranks  of  the 
people  themselves,  were  probably  much  greater  than  at 
any  former  time.  The  general  level  of  intelligence 
proved  to  be  such  that  there  was  little  ground  for  gloom 
about  it.  Perhaps  the  most  impressive  feature  was  that 
increased  knowledge  and  civilisation  appeared  to  have 
brought  in  their  train  no  such  paralysing  influences  as 
the  critics  used  to  forecast.  It  was  the  most  highly 
educated  and  civilised  peoples  that  fought  best.  The 
formidable  terrors  of  increased  science  were  compensated 
for  by  increased  courage,  and  most  of  all  among  those 
who  knew  best  what  science  could  threaten. 

Still,  even  when  good  quality  in  the  average  level  has 
been  recognised,  there  remains  in  the  onlooker  a  sense 
of  something  wanting.  Without  a  permeating  faith  of 
some  kind,  a  faith  that  can  compel  in  ordinary  times  as 
well  as  in  those  of  emergency,  a  people  can  hardly  remain 
great.  The  faith  may  have  to  assume  different  forms  in 
different  countries.  It  may  take  the  form  of  a  definite 
religious  conviction,  and  this  has  naturally  been  the  case 
in  the  past  with  nations  that  tended  to  believe  fervently 
in  their  mission  to  convert  the  world  to  truth.  As  time 
goes  on  and  dogmas  die,  this  form  of  popular  belief  dis- 
plays itself  less  frequently.  A  more  common  form, 
especially  in  modern  times,  has  been  the  faith  of  a  nation 


6  INTRODUCTORY 

in  the  overwhelming  justice  of  its  claim  to  individual 
greatness.  We  saw  such  a  faith  emerge  long  ago  in 
ancient  Rome.  We  have  seen  it  later  on  in  the  France 
of  Louis  XIV  and  Napoleon  Bonaparte.  We  have  wit- 
nessed it  still  more  recently  in  modern  Germany.  Some- 
thing of  the  sort,  perhaps  a  good  deal  more  than  is 
desirable,  we  are  aware  of  among  ourselves.  In  the  case 
of  each  nation  there  has  been  a  general  outlook,  varying  in 
form  and  mode  of  influence.  For  each  people  there  has 
been  a  national  philosophy  which  has  been  tacitly  em- 
bodied in  its  tendencies.  The  view  of  life  acted  on  in 
each  particular  country  is  different  from  that  of  its 
neighbours.  The  difference  becomes  apparent,  not  only 
in  the  national  literature,  but  in  the  utterances  of  states- 
men. The  tone  has  to  accord  with  the  mood  of  those 
addressed.  At  times  the  mood  and  the  tone  become 
modified.  They  may  rapidly  be  changed  by  the  results 
of  some  great  convulsion.  A  war  of  sufficient  magnitude 
will  apparently  transform  both,  and  so  may  some  far- 
reaching  political  convulsion,  such  as  in  British  history 
was  the  expulsion  of  the  Stuarts  and  the  definite  estab- 
lishment of  a  new  relation  between  sovereign  and  subject 
under  the  Revolution  Settlement. 

But  in  the  main  the  state  of  knowledge,  using  the  word 
to  cover  knowledge  in  the  widest  sense,  seems  to  be  in 
the  long  run  the  governing  factor.  Practice  always,  in 
some  respect  at  least,  reflects  principle,  and  is  influenced 
by  accepted  objectives  where  they  exist.  For  the  develop- 
ment of  the  soul  of  a  people,  it  is  therefore  necessary 
to  go  beyond  the  transient  work  which  is  all  that  the 
mere  man  of  affairs  can  accomplish.  There  must  always 
remain  much  that  he  cannot  give,  and  for  the  deeper  and 
more  abiding  inspiration  we  have  to  look  to  others  than 
our  rulers.  The  greatest  reformers,  those  whose  influ- 
ence has  been  the  most  far-reaching  and  abiding,  have 
been  the  reformers  of  the  soul  rather  than  of  the  body. 
That  is  why  it  is  so  important  that  our  ministers  of 
religion,  our  men  of  letters,  our  scholars,  our  artists,  our 
men  of  science,  and  our  thinkers  generally,  should  re- 
member that  they  are  under  a  responsibility  to  society  at 
large.  Where  they  have  failed  to  realise  this,  the  reason 
for  their  failure  seems  to  have  been  something  that  was 
wrong  with  themselves. 


CO-OPERATION   NECESSARY  7 

To-day  some  of  these  spiritual  reformers  appear  to  be 
succeeding  in  their  task,  and  others  to  be  failing  in  it. 
One  reason  for  this  is  the  difficulty  they  experience  in 
mutual  co-operation.  This  difficulty  is  at  least  partly 
due  to  the  current  state  of  knowledge.  Those  who  possess 
special  knowledge  live  in  different  camps.  For  instance, 
to  talk  to-day  of  harmony  between  religion  and  science 
is  to  use  words  that  have  little  meaning.  If  the  clergy 
and  the  scientific  laity  are  disposed  to  fight  less  than 
they  once  did,  it  is  because  they  think  about  each  other 
less  than  in  the  days  when  rigid  orthodoxy  was  held  in 
higher  esteem. 

Now  some  progress  in  the  work  of  co-operation  for  a 
great  common  end  would  naturally  result  if  it  were 
practicable  to  render  the  various  forms  of  knowledge 
capable  of  being  brought  into  organic  relation  with  each 
other.  The  leaders  in  each  branch  would  be  in  such  an 
event  more  effective  in  so  far  as  they  were  clearer  as 
to  what  they  could  tell  us  about  the  boundaries  and 
understandings  between  themselves  and  those  engaged 
in  other  kinds  of  teaching.  If  progress  is  to  be  practicable 
in  the  development  of  a  unifying  tendency  throughout 
knowledge  as  a  whole,  it  must  accordingly  rest  on  the 
survey  of  the  general  field  of  knowledge  in  the  light  of 
principles  that  are  fit  to  be  accepted.  Do  such  principles 
exist  ?  This  is  the  question  which  I  shall  venture  to 
consider  in  the  course  of  the  pages  that  follow. 

I  will  offer  no  further  apology  for  presuming  to  under- 
take a  difficult  task.  My  reason  for  entering  on  it  is  not 
any  idea  that  I  can  do  so  better  or  even  as  well  as  others, 
but  the  sense  that  the  task  is  an  essential  one.  There 
is  little  chance  of  progress  unless  it  is  preceded  by  a 
systematic  attempt  to  extract  from  below  accumulated 
matter  what  there  is  reason  to  regard  as  valuable  truth 
lying  buried  there.  What  has  to  be  brought  to  the 
surface  seems  to  deserve  the  name  of  truth.  For  scrutiny 
appears  to  disclose  that  the  evolution  of  thought,  ancient 
as  well  as  modern,  has  really  resulted  in  more  harmony 
of  result  than  is  popularly  supposed.  It  is  the  relativity 
of  the  different  standpoints  of  the  historians  that  has 
been  the  main  factor  in  obscuring  this  harmony.  We  may 
come  to  think  that  the  great  systems  which  have  been 
borne  down  to  us  by  the  current  of  reflection,  in  our  own 


8  INTRODUCTORY 

and  in  past  generations,  have  brought  with  them  more 
of  an  enduring  basis  on  which  to  build  up  a  general  out- 
look than  we  had  imagined.  When  read  in  the  light  of 
certain  things  which  we  have  learned  to-day,  the  great 
systems  of  reflective  thought  suggest  convergence  on 
principles  reached  in  common,  principles  which  harmonise 
in  their  main  results,  however  different  in  expression  they 
appear.  No  doubt  there  have  been  intense  controversies, 
controversies  in  which  direct  denial  of  the  truth  of  previous 
ideas  has  been  placed  in  the  forefront.  But  in  the  end 
it  has  seemed  as  though,  even  in  these  cases,  the  negative 
had  in  the  main  become  incorporated  with  that  against 
which  it  was  directed,  and  that  a  freshly  stated  and 
more  comprehensive  result  had  been  the  outcome. 

We  are  too  prone  to  read  the  history  of  philosophical 
knowledge  as  though  it  consisted  of  a  record  of  mere 
corrections  of  error  and  supersessions  of  defective  opinion. 
In  reality  it  is  the  history  of  advance  in  ideas  which  have 
been  revolutionary  mainly  in  their  expression.  Between 
the  teaching  of  the  great  schools  of  Grecian  thinkers,  those 
schools  which  were  led  by  such  men  as  Plato,  Aristotle, 
and  Plotinus,  and  the  teaching  of  the  great  idealists  of 
the  modern  world,  there  is  no  insuperable  gulf.  If  we 
strip  the  forms  of  such  teaching  of  the  mere  setting  that 
has  been  due  to  the  times,  the  agreement  is  more  marked 
than  is  the  difference.  Applying  to  philosophy  the  his- 
torical method,  we  can  trace  the  divergences  that  are 
distinctive  of  the  modern  outlook  largely  to  the  measur- 
able influences  of  intervening  factors.  There  is,  for 
example,  the  modern  tendency  of  human  intelligence  to 
concentrate  itself  on  exact  science,  a  concentration  which 
is  far  from  showing  signs  of  diminution.  The  progress 
of  mathematics  and  of  physical  and  biological  conceptions 
has  resulted  in  much  influence  on  formal  methods,  in- 
cluding even  those  of  metaphysicians.  Then  there  has 
been  the  moulding  power  of  Christianity  and,  hardly  less, 
of  the  Renaissance,  and  finally  there  has  been  the  changing 
but  permeating  literary  atmosphere  in  which  expression 
has  had  to  take  place. 

In  reading  the  history  of  philosophy  we  have  accord- 
ingly to  read  it  as  we  have  learned  to  study  the  history  of 
religion,  including  the  Bible  itself,  as  Matthew  Arnold 
long  ago  told  us  to  read  it.  The  story  cannot  be  taken 


HOW    WE    SHOULD    READ    PHILOSOPHY         9 

apart  from  its  context  in  the  surroundings  amid  which 
from  time  to  time  it  has  been  written.  But  there  is  a 
continuity  in  that  story  which  reflection  brings  to  light. 
To  grasp  that  continuity  requires  concentration  and 
patience.  But  it  seems  to  disclose  itself  as  unbroken 
when  these  are  brought  to  bear  on  the  survey  of  the  story 
as  a  whole.  Without  any  attempt  to  write  a  history  of 
philosophy,  it  is  my  object  to  do  what  I  can  to  contribute 
something  to  the  disentangling  process.  For  there  is 
much  that  has  been  from  time  to  time  overlooked,  and  a 
good  deal  that  seems  as  though  it  was  being  overlooked 
even  to-day. 

The  successive  forms  of  intellectual  and  spiritual  activity 
in  philosophical  thought  do  not,  when  regarded  from 
this  outlook,  appear  to  have  really  brought  about  as 
great  a  change  in  the  substance  remoulded  in  them  as 
people  think.  They  have  had  much  to  do  with  the  correc- 
tion of  the  abstractness  and  also  of  the  looseness  of  many 
of  the  old  modes  of  expressing  truth.  They  have  given 
rise  to  new  expressions  about  the  character  of  both  know- 
ledge and  reality,  and  have  resulted  in  subordinate  schools 
as  transitory  as  they  have  been  subordinate.  But,  tran- 
sient as  these  have  been,  they  have  often  proved  in  their 
own  periods  of  great  value.  We  owe,  for  instance,  much 
to  what  is  called  Mentalism  or  Subjective  Idealism.  It  may 
to-day  be  rejected  as  a  superseded  and  inadequate  theory 
about  reality.  But  it  has  served  its  purpose  by  dragging 
to  light  a  great  deal  that  before  its  time  had  not  been 
adequately  thought  out.  If  of  little  value  for  construc- 
tion, it  has  had  much  for  criticism.  It  has  shown  itself 
to  be  a  valuable  form  of  the  negative,  and,  like  other 
forms  of  the  negative,  it  has  been  incorporated  and 
absorbed,  without  having  permanently  arrested  the 
stream  of  tendency.  There  is  no  modern  thinker  who 
does  not  owe  something  to  such  subjective  idealists  as 
Berkeley  and  Hume.  There  are  but  few  who  remain  of 
their  way  of  thinking. 

Similarly,  the  attempt  to  throw  philosophy  into  the 
form  that  the  science  of  the  period  called  for  has  had 
much  influence  in  preparing  for  reflection  on  how  to  pene- 
trate deeper  than  even  modern  science  can.  The  doctrine 
of  evolution  and  the  wider  doctrine  of  development ;  the 
modern  theory  of  the  relativity  of  relations  in  space  and 


10  INTRODUCTORY 

time ;  the  introduction  into  biology  of  the  notion  of 
end  as  preferable  for  guiding  observation  to  that  of  cause  ; 
these,  and  countless  other  changes  which  have  shown 
themselves  in  new  kinds  of  scientific  conception,  have 
necessitated  fresh  fashions  of  approach  and  of  statement 
in  philosophy  itself.  But,  again,  these  new  ideas  may 
well  turn  out  to  have  in  the  end  only  the  sort  of  value 
which  fashions  which  were  fresh  a  hundred  or  two  hundred 
years  ago  possessed.  They  have  been  necessary  for  the 
purpose  of  bringing  to  the  light  narrow  views  held  about 
the  material  with  which  we  have  been  dealing,  rather  than 
for  that  of  contributing  to  any  result  conclusive  in  itself 
as  to  the  knowledge  of  that  in  which  reality  consists. 
The  more  we  study  the  history  of  thought,  the  more  does 
it  become  apparent  that  the  advantage  of  modern  thinkers 
over  inquirers  such  as  Aristotle  lies  chiefly  in  the  external 
materials  with  which  they  have  worked.  The  root 
problem  has  been  the  same,  and  the  advance  towards  the 
later  solutions  has  been  greater  in  superficial  aspect  than 
in  substance. 

Still,  this  does  not  really  imply  that  there  has  been  no 
progress  in  the  search  after  truth.  Were  it  said  without 
careful  qualification  about  the  progress  of  discovery  in 
science  it  would  indeed  give  cause  for  heart-searching. 
That  is  because  science  recognises  as  required  by  its  special 
standards  of  truth  the  definite  results  obtained  from  the 
balance  and  the  measuring  rod.  Advance  tested  only  by 
these  standards  must  be  mainly  advance  in  quantitative 
result,  rather  than  in  interpretation  in  its  fullest  form. 
When  we  apply  another  kind  of  test  in  the  search  after 
truth,  it  does  not  alarm  us  if  we  are  told  that  humanity 
has  not  got  to  a  higher  level  in  literature  and  art  than 
it  did  in  the  days  of  ancient  Greece.  That  is  because  we 
are  using  a  different  standard,  and  recognise  that  here 
we  are  concerned,  not  with  measurement  in  time  and 
space,  but  with  value  in  quality.  Now  in  qualitative 
value  there  is  of  course  advance,  but  it  is  advance  of  a 
kind  different  from  what  can  be  expressed  in  figures  or  in 
quantitative  or  serial  symbols. 

Poetry  has  been  described  as  being  the  most  perfect 
speech  of  man,  that  in  which  he  comes  nearest  to  being 
able  to  utter  truth.  But  this  description  depends  for  its 
sufficiency  upon  its  being  clearly  understood  what  is  meant 


TRUTH  AND   VALUE  11 

by  perfection.  To  the  mathematician  there  is  an  advance 
towards  perfection  in  speech  when  the  current  ideas  about 
infinitely  small  quantities,  inherited  from  Newton  and 
Leibnitz,  have  been  thrown  overboard,  and  the  limits  of 
functions  have  been  expressed  as  depending  simply  on 
order  in  series.  It  is  for  the  mathematician  a  real  step 
forward  when  he  gets  rid  of  the  notion  of  counting  as  an 
adequate  basis  for  number,  and  can  explain  it  as  the 
designation  of  classes  of  similar  collections,  with  which  he 
can  operate  in  his  science,  although  they  may  include,  not 
only  what  can  be  counted,  but  the  transfinite  numbers 
which  by  their  very  nature  cannot  be  counted  in  the  way 
that  obtains  in  arithmetic. 

All  this  may  be  truth  of  a  very  high  nature,  but  it  is 
not  the  truth  of  poetry.  Value  for  mathematics  depends 
on  standards  that  are  different  from  those  applied  in  the 
domain  of  art.  Truth  for  the  mathematician  is  concerned 
with  the  structure  of  conceptions  belonging  to  order  in 
externality  in  its  widest  sense,  in  which  greater  and  less 
mean  something  that,  although  not  necessarily  dependent 
on  arithmetical  counting,  still  does  depend  on  order  in 
quantity  based  on  a  not  wholly  dissimilar  principle.  But 
truth  in  poetry  depends  on  a  value  in  quality  belonging 
to  a  different  order  in  reflection.  Now  value,  however 
subjective  it  may  seem  to  be  to  the  mind  that  is  not 
sufficiently  developed  to  judge  it,  is  yet  estimated  by 
standards  which  are  final,  in  the  sense  that  our  minds 
are  compelled  in  the  end  to  accept  the  standards,  just  as  in 
the  case  of  those  employed  in  our  judgments  of  quantity. 
That  this  is  so,  and  that  judgments  of  qualitative  value 
have  the  significance  of  fundamental  truth,  the  history  of 
literature  and  art  is  the  witness.  It  is  without  hesitation 
that  we  have  for  all  time  placed  Wordsworth  higher  than 
Eliza  Cook,  and  Homer,  Dante,  Shakespeare,  and  Goethe 
above  the  minor  poets  of  our  own  and  other  countries. 
So  it  is  in  pictorial  art  and  in  religion  also.  We  know 
broad  differences  in  value  there  as  certainly  as  we  know 
the  differences  between  light  and  darkness. 

The  predominance  of  the  value  that  is  qualitative  thus 
distinguishes  certain  kinds  of  truth  from  what  falls  short 
of  being  the  full  truth.  The  standards  in  the  former  are 
really  final  and  foundational,  as  much  as  in  the  instances 
of  truth  of  a  scientific  order,  notwithstanding  that  the 


12  INTRODUCTORY 

tests  by  which  they  are  applied  belong  to  a  mode  of 
reflection  different  from  that  to  which  what  are  popularly 
called  scientific  standards  belong.  The  orders  in  both 
cases  include  conceptions,  but  these  are  neither  of  the 
same  kind  nor  applied  in  the  same  way.  We  do  not 
arrange  serially  the  objects  to  which  the  standards  of 
ethical  or  artistic  excellence  apply.  We  speak  of  both 
Sophocles  and  Shakespeare  as  dramatic  poets  of  the 
highest  genius.  And,  while  we  recognise  the  great  differ- 
ences which  characterise  their  poetry,  we  do  not  try  to 
inquire  arithmetically  which  poetry  was  the  best.  On 
the  contrary,  we  say  that  each  belonged  to  the  finest 
level  of  its  own  kind,  one  which  in  its  own  fashion  was  the 
highest  imaginable  by  us,  estimated  by  tests  which  we 
cannot  but  accept  and  beyond  which  imagination  does 
not  point. 

It  is  thus  that  it  becomes  clear  that  truth  has  a  meaning 
which  is  in  important  respects  relative  to  the  subject- 
matter.  In  the  history  of  literature  we  are  prepared,  as 
we  are  not  in  the  history  of  science,  to  find  truth  attained 
not  less  completely  in  periods  that  are  gone  than  in  the 
period  of  to-day.  The  form,  the  mode  of  expression,  may 
in  literature  belong  to  what  is  past.  But  the  substance, 
the  quality,  belongs  to  what  is  independent  of  time  and 
space  and  change  ;  it  is  of  an  order  that  actually  lies 
outside  time,  for  sequence  in  time  and  continuance  do  not 
essentially  concern  it.  It  is  not  with  order  in  quantity 
that  we  are  concerned  here. 

When  we  speak  of  what  is  true  in  literature  and  music 
and  art  we  mean  something  different  from  what  we  have 
in  our  minds  when  we  are  discussing  scientific  theory. 
Yet  even  in  science  what  is  recognised  as  true  may  imply 
much  that  belongs  to  varieties  in  level  that  are  not  con- 
cerned with  mere  quantity.  In  biology  and  in  medicine 
we  observe  what  has  aspects  other  than  those  of  the 
mechanical  and  belongs  to  a  different  order.  The  doctrines 
of  evolution,  of  heredity,  and  of  growth  appear  to  necessi- 
tate the  recognition  of  ends  in  operation,  as  distinguished 
from  external  causes  ;  ends,  the  operation  of  which  is 
of  such  a  character  that  difficulties  about  action  at  a 
distance  disappear,  and  that  the  ends  themselves  take 
external  shape  in  the  phenomenon  of  a  whole  which  has 
no  existence  outside  its  members  and  the  material  in 


THE   MEANING  OF  TRUTH  13 

which  it  expresses  and  conserves  itself,  maintaining  un- 
broken the  identity  of  the  organism  through  its  course 
from  its  conception  to  its  death,  notwithstanding  meta- 
bolism and  constant  change  in  material.  In  medicine  it 
is  far  from  clear  that  the  nature  of  the  stimulus  imparted 
by  a  drug  to  the  performance  of  function  by  the  organism 
can  be  expressed  in  terms  of  physics  or  of  chemistry. 
The  character  of  the  stimulus  belongs  to  the  domain  of 
life,  and  distinctive  differences  in  mode  of  operation  are 
obvious.  Even  in  sciences  that  are  concerned  with 
externality  as  such,  like  mathematics  and  physics  them- 
selves, adequacy  implies  more  than  mere  correctness  in 
ordinary  measurement.  Of  this  the  teaching  of  Einstein 
is  the  demonstration.  Still,  in  science  generally  measure- 
ment is  in  itself  of  the  highest  importance.  Even  in 
physiology  the  conceptions  and  methods  of  physics  and 
chemistry  are  not  only  capable  of  application  to  the 
phenomena  of  the  living  being,  to  the  measurement  of 
the  taking  in  and  giving  out,  for  example,  of  its  energy, 
but  are  essential  for  exact  knowledge  about  these 
phenomena.  Science  is  largely  concerned  with  the 
mechanical  standpoint  from  which  truth  is  the  measur- 
able agreement  of  the  conception  framed  with  its  object 
as  something  external  to  and  independent  of  it.  The 
adjustment  of  the  terms  in  which  its  conceptions  are  to 
be  expressed  must  accordingly  depend  largely  on  the 
balance  and  the  measuring  rod. 

It  is  in  the  light  of  experience  such  as  I  have  referred 
to,  that  we  become  aware  that  when  we  talk  of  truth  we 
sometimes  have  in  our  heads  an  agreement,  depending  on 
comparison  of  relations  in  time  and  space  of  images  with 
their  objects,  or  that  we  may  mean,  as  in  literature, 
music,  and  art  generally,  what  is  of  a  different  kind, 
depending  on  adequacy  of  that  which  is  expressed  to  an 
ideal  of  value  that  imposes  its  authority,  as  it  were,  from 
within  the  mind  itself.  The  question  that  now  arises  is 
what  we  mean  by  truth  in  philosophy.  There  is  no  doubt 
that  philosophy  is  dependent  on  science  in  a  way  that  art, 
for  example,  is  not.  For  the  excellence  of  a  picture  it  is 
wholly  immaterial  whether  its  object  has  ever  been 
there,  or  whether  the  details  ever  appeared  in  time  and 
space  in  the  proportions  in  which  the  artist  has  made  them 
stand.  The  cottage  and  the  girl  who  appears  at  its  door 
8 


14  INTRODUCTORY 

may  never  have  existed.  Or  if  they  did,  and  if  what  is 
sought  to  be  conveyed  is  artistic  value,  and  not  mere 
reproduction  of  details,  as  in  the  case  of  a  photograph, 
exactitude  is  of  little  importance.  What  matters  is  the 
quality  of  the  idea  that  the  picture  awakens.  That  is 
its  value  as  true  for  art.  But  if  philosophy,  the  problem 
of  which  is  always  the  final  character  of  reality,  is  to  give 
an  enlightening  account  of  that  reality,  it  must  be  under 
no  mistakes  as  to  the  scientific  truth  about  the  facts 
which  it  has  to  interpret.  Accuracy  is  here  indispensable, 
for  otherwise  the  supposed  facts  will  not  in  the  end  stand 
for  facts,  and  confidence  will  not  be  commanded.  That 
is  why,  despite  the  great  contribution  which  the  Greeks 
made  to  the  interpretation  of  the  universe  as  they  con- 
ceived it,  faith  in  that  interpretation  has  been  lessened 
by  the  great  growth  in  scientific  knowledge  which  has 
taken  place  since  the  days  in  which  Bacon  wrote.  New 
information  about  the  facts  has  entailed  modifications  in 
much  of  the  interpretation  that  the  Greeks  put  on  what 
had  to  be  interpreted. 

Nevertheless  the  Greeks  did  many  things  that  have 
advanced  our  understanding  of  the  actual,  a  great  deal 
more  than  they  usually  get  credit  for.  The  general 
character  of  reality  received  a  treatment  at  their  hands 
which  dispelled  a  good  many  partial  notions.  This  is 
true  in  particular,  as  we  shall  see  later  on,  of  what  they 
taught  about  the  general  relation  of  knowledge  to  the 
actual.  For  them  knowledge  meant  knowledge  without 
restriction  of  character,  direct  and  indirect,  aesthetic  as 
well  as  scientific.  For  they  had  realised  that  the  com- 
plete truth  is  the  whole,  and  that  the  different  kinds 
of  reflection  fall,  along  with  their  objects,  within  an 
entirety. 

The  outcome  seems,  then,  to  be  that  what  we  really 
mean  by  truth  may  sometimes  have  to  be  construed  as 
extending  to  more  than  the  mere  agreement  of  our  ideas 
with  what  is  conceived  as  existing  apart  from  and  as 
external  to  them.  The  test  of  truth  may  have  to  be 
adequacy  in  a  fuller  form,  a  form  which  is  concerned,  not 
f  only  with  the  result  of  measurement  with  the  balance  or 
the  rule,  but  with  value  that  cannot  be  so  measured  and 
that  depends  on  other  orders  in  thinking.  What  is  truth 
from  one  standpoint  may  not  of  necessity  stand  for  truth 


THE  TEST  OF  TRUTH  15 

from    another.     Relativity,    depending   on   the    standard 
used,  may  intrude  itself  in  varying  forms. 

To  be  true  a  conception  must  be  adequate.  Its  adequacy 
for  the  special  purpose  in  view  may  consist  in  its  agree- 
ment with  the  results  ascertained  by  measurement.  Or  it 
may  consist  in  its  value  as  lifting  us  above  what  seems  to 
be  of  a  low  order,  relatively  to  higher  quality  recognised 
by  criteria  that  are  foundational.  This  is  the  truth 
which  we  recognise  in  a  work  of  art  when  it  gives  us  the 
sense  that  beyond  what  it  expresses  there  is  nothing 
higher  of  which  we  can  form  any  idea.  It  may  be  that 
it  is  only  in  art  in  some  form,  awakening  in  us  the 
feeling  that  we  are  lifted  above  relativity  and  are  in  the 
presence  of  what  of  its  own  kind  is  perfect  and  complete,  that 
we  can  have  this  sense  without  qualification.  But  some- 
thing like  it  arises  in  our  souls  in  religious  consciousness 
also,  depending  as  it  does  on  a  feeling  of  finiteness  accepted 
and  as  accepted  transcended.  This  is  an  example  of 
adequacy  in  value  of  another  form.  In  neither  case  is 
feeling  wholly  divorced  from  reflection.  And  if  a  level 
were  attainable  at  which  the  apparent  separation  between 
thought  and  feeling  were  superseded,  there  would  be  no 
sharp  distinction  between  the  various  forms  of  adequacy, 
scientific  and  aesthetic.  It  may  therefore  be  stated 
generally  that  an  idea  is  true  when  it  is  adequate,  and 
only  completely  adequate  when  it  is,  from  every  point 
of  view,  true.  Each  form  of  test  that  is  applicable  must 
be  satisfied  in  the  conception  of  perfect  adequacy  ;  for 
otherwise  we  can  have  only  truth  that  is  relative  to 
particular  standpoints. 

It  seemed  desirable  to  get  this  almost  but  not  quite 
obvious  proposition  clear  before  proceeding  to  search  for  a 
principle  by  the  light  of  which  certain  important  forms,  in 
which  it  is  currently  claimed  that  truth  is  correctly  pre- 
sented, may  be  called  into  the  witness-box  for  examination. 


CHAPTER   II 

THE   DOMAIN   OF   SCIENCE 

IN  the  conclusion  of  the  last  chapter  it  was  suggested  that 
the  word  "  truth  "  is  not  free  from  ambiguities.  It  has, 
latent  in  it,  implications  dependent  on  our  standpoints. 
The  truthful  description  of  nature  given  by  the  physicist 
may  be  highly  divergent  from  that  given  by  the  poet. 
For  they  have  approached  nature  from  different  points  of 
view,  and  have  brought  to  bear  conceptions  of  reality  that 
belong  to  different  orders  in  thought.  The  poet  has  no 
use  for  the  differential  equation  of  the  physicist,  the  stan- 
dards of  which  are  not  concerned  with  emotion.  To  the 
physicist,  on  the  other  hand,  the  imagery  in  which  the 
poet  idealises  the  sunset  may  well  seem  to  be,  from  a 
strictly  scientific  point  of  view,  greatly  misleading. 

Yet  for  criticism  that  is  to  be  adequate  both  stand- 
points are  required.  For  truth  is  relative.  The  two  out- 
looks have  their  justification  in  the  different  orders  in 
reflection  to  which  they  belong.  Moreover,  there  is  some 
analogy  between  the  method  of  science  and  that  of  the 
poet  and  the  artist.  In  mathematics,  for  example,  science 
constructs  what  are  pictorial  symbols.  These  may  be 
geometrical  figures  or  they  may  be  arithmetical  numbers, 
or  they  may  be  algebraical  forms  that  symbolise  general 
conceptions  applicable  to  classes  of  numbers,  such  as  the 
symbols  that  figure  in  an  equation.  But  pictorial  they 
are.  They  are  objects  to  be  looked  at,  and  to  be  experi- 
mented with  by  moving  them  about  on  paper.  When  the 
mathematician  transforms  the  equation  x  —  y  into 
x  —  y  —  0,  he  can  interpret  what  he  has  done  mediately, 
by  reflecting  about  it.  But  reflect  extensively  he  need 
not,  for  he  can  see  at  a  glance  that  the  result  is  correct. 
He  has  been  experimenting  with  objects  the  relative 
position  of  which  on  the  paper  he  has  changed,  and  his 
eyes  tell  him  that  the  re -arrangement  was  justified.  No 

16 


THE   VICTORIAN   OUTLOOK  17 

doubt  concepts  are  implied,  and  the  process  can  be 
expressed  for  reflection  in  a  logical  form.  But  he  has  not 
needed  to  reflect  fully.  What  he  has  done,  by  a  resort 
to  symbols  apparently  merely  external,  has  been  to  effect 
at  the  least  a  great  economy  in  thinking,  and  he  has  come 
to  his  new  result  apparently  through  immediate  percep- 
tion. In  this  fashion  he  cannot  only  get  at  truth  by 
short  cuts,  but  he  can  make  discoveries  which  might  have 
been  very  difficult,  if  not  impracticable,  for  abstract 
logic.  It  is  in  ways  not  very  different  that  the  poet  and 
the  artist  construct  images  which  seem  to  require  no 
speech  to  explain  them,  and  can  be  used  in  reflection  as 
we  use  counters  or  banknotes.  They  stand  for  meaning 
which  we  do  not  need  to  express,  although  it  is  there 
implicitly. 

Let  us  pursue  this  line  of  reflection  a  little  further,  by 
extending  its  application  to  the  domain  of  physical 
science.  We  will  begin  by  asking  what  is  the  view  of 
nature  which  the  physicist  fashions  for  himself. 

There  are  not  many  features  of  the  intellectual  life  of 
the  twentieth  century  more  interesting  than  a  new 
disposition  that  is  becoming  very  prominent.  It  is  the 
disposition  to  search  for  and  drag  to  light  unconsciously 
made  assumptions.  How  much  may  not  the  individual 
mind  of  the  observer  have  deflected  the  real  results  which 
his  observation  has  yielded  ?  What  are  the  facts  as  truly 
apprehended  in  their  integrity  ? 

The  necessity  of  putting  such  questions  is  becoming 
more  and  more  evident.  In  the  last  century  many 
prominent  Victorian  men  of  science  had  a  theory,  which 
Professor  Whitehead,  who  has  written  two  books  to 
which  I  shall  refer  a  little  later  on,  has  called  the  "  bifur- 
cation "  theory.  For  these  Victorians  the  object-world 
of  what  we  call  "  nature  "  was  distinguishable  into  two 
separate  phases.  One  was  the  genuine  objective  reality. 
This  consisted  in  a  self-subsisting  and  uniform  system 
of  space  and  time,  with  its  points  and  instants  independent 
of  the  events  that  occurred  at  them.  Within  this  frame- 
work, and  conforming  to  its  structure,  there  was  a 
mechanistic  assemblage  of  atoms  and  energy,  consisting  of 
and  operating  within  an  all -pervading  material  substance 
which  they  called  the  aether,  and  which  disclosed  the  atoms 
and  the  energy  as  varying  attributes  of  matter.  The  other 


18  THE  DOMAIN   OF   SCIENCE 

phase  of  the  world  of  nature  was  wholly  diverse.  It  was 
not  real  in  the  sense  the  first  was  real,  as  something 
existing  quite  independently  of  any  relation  to  the  mind, 
but  subjective,  in  the  sense  that  it  arose  only  in  perception 
and  by  individual  interpretation  of  the  results  of  causes 
belonging  to  the  objective  domain  of  the  first  phase, 
causes  which,  as  they  maintained,  could  be  resorted  to 
inferentially  as  the  explanation  of  the  mental  results. 
These  latter  were,  in  effect,  secondary  as  distinguished 
from  primary  qualities.  Thus  the  colour  violet  was  a 
subjective  phenomenon  of  a  secondary  kind,  but  it  could 
be  connected,  by  the  intelligence  of  a  person  sufficiently 
educated,  with  primary  phenomena  in  the  form  of  causes 
which  could  be  observed  in  nature  as  motion  in  certain 
wave-lengths  in  the  aether.  The  explanation  was  not  an 
easy  one  to  follow,  for  it  could  not  show  any  identity 
between  cause  and  effect  such  as  science  searches  for. 
But  it  was  generally  accepted. 

Not  all  of  these  Victorians  were  untroubled  about  this 
bifurcation  doctrine,  for  the  philosophical  critics  of  the 
time,  some  of  whom  were  well  equipped  by  studies  in  the 
controversies  of  past  periods,  accused  them  of  having 
lapsed  into  obsolete  metaphysics  without  knowing  it,  and 
certain  of  the  physicists  themselves  were  disposed  to 
think  that  no  good  answer  to  such  criticism  had  been 
given  by  science.  But  so  long  as  the  bifurcation  doctrine 
prevailed,  and  no  common  root  for  the  two  phases  in 
nature  could  be  stated  intelligibly,  the  tendency  to  divide 
reality  into  two  independent  parts  remained  unchecked. 

The  view  commonly  assumed  as  true  by  the  majority 
of  the  Victorian  men  of  science,  even  when  they  did  not 
state  it  explicitly,  met  with  a  good  deal  of  remonstrance 
from  the  laity.  A  story  is  recorded  of  an  occupant  of  the 
Woolsack,  a  man  with  a  mind  that  was  highly  distin- 
guished for  its  penetrating  capacity  in  other  fields  of 
knowledge,  but  was  not  versed  in  either  philosophy  or 
science.  He  happened  to  be  returning  from  a  meeting  of 
a  well-known  society  which  then  existed.  The  society 
was  one  formed  for  the  discussion  of  metaphysical  subjects. 
There  had  been  a  dinner  of  its  members  out  of  London, 
and  some  of  the  party,  including  the  Lord  Chancellor  and 
several  eminent  men  of  science,  were  returning  to  London 
by  train.  The  talk  in  the  railway  carriage  turned  on  the 


THE   VICTORIAN  LORD   CHANCELLOR  19 

distinction  between  wave-lengths  in  the  aether  as  external 
causes  and  colours  as  purely  subjective  effects,  and  on 
the  somewhat  meagre,  if  still  highly  important,  phases  in 
nature  which  were  all  that  the  science  of  the  day  would 
recognise  as  real  independently  of  the  mind  of  the  observer. 
The  Lord  Chancellor  is  said  to  have  listened  attentively 
for  some  time,  and  then  to  have  put  a  searching  question, 
"  But  do  you  mean  to  tell  me  that  the  blue  of  that  cushion 
is  only  in  my  eye  ?  " 

Whatever  science  may  have  thought  forty  years  ago, 
to-day  the  distinguished  Judge,  had  he  been  alive,  would 
have  found  the  scientific  world  largely  on  his  side.  For 
the  blue  is  beginning  to  be  generally  looked  upon  as  no 
more  merely  in  a  man's  head  than  is  the  electron  or  the 
point-event  of  the  outside  world.  People  do  not  now  try 
to  bifurcate  nature  in  the  old  fashion.  The  outside  world, 
as  I  look  on  it  while  writing  at  this  window,  lies  before  me 
with  riches  of  which  every  phase  truly  belongs  to  it  as 
genuinely  as  does  any  other.  It  exhibits  mechanistic 
features,  but  it  also  has  biological  aspects  not  less  impor- 
tant. It  discloses  the  shaping  influences  of  ends,  and  it 
possesses  colour  and  beauty  and  value.  From  different 
standpoints  all  these  come  into  and  belong  to  the  entirety 
of  the  world  as  it  is  stretched  out  before  me.  Take 
away  any  of  them  and  that  world  will  not  only  mean 
but  be  something  different.  I  who  am  observing  it  am 
myself  one  among  the  numerous  objects  which  I  identify 
as  belonging  to  it.  There  is  a  single  whole  within  which 
fall  matter  and  mind  alike.  We  may  explain  it  as  we 
please,  we  may  describe  in  what  it  consists,  but  that  it  is 
for  us  as  it  seems  is  a  final  fact.  Such  is  at  least  the  view 
which  is  beginning  to  be  insisted  on  in  the  twentieth 
century,  even  in  scientific  circles.  The  Victorian  school  of 
which  I  have  been  speaking  thought  of  the  mind  as  one 
thing  and  of  what  it  observed  as  another  thing.  They 
applied  the  category  of  entity  or  substance  to  both  with- 
out pausing  to  take  breath.  That  was  in  reality  why  the 
Lord  Chancellor  grew  suspicious  of  them.  To-day  the 
method  of  the  Victorian  physicists  and  biologists  is  being 
rapidly  relegated  to  the  lumber-room.  It  is  science  itself, 
much  more  than  philosophy,  that  is  sending  it  there. 
Modern  men  of  science  do  not  now  think  of  the  world  as 
consisting  of  an  objective  portion,  including  certain 


20  THE  DOMAIN   OF   SCIENCE 

separable  and  self-subsistent  entities,  or  follow  blindly  the 
principle  which  John  Locke  long  ago  made  popular  because 
it  seemed  so  simple.  The  battery  of  criticism  brought  to 
bear  on  Victorian  scientific  speculation  by  mathematicians, 
physicists,  and  biologists,  not  less  than  by  men  with  names 
well-known  in  philosophy,  and  by  others,  believers  in  the 
reality  of  universals,  some  of  whom  were  the  spiritual 
fathers  of  the  New  Realists  of  to-day,  has  done  its  work. 
The  "  bifurcation "  doctrine  is  in  ruins.  Science  does 
not  now  concern  itself  with  distinction  of  entities  nearly 
so  much  as  with  distinction  of  standpoints,  whether  these 
are  the  standpoints  of  observers  in  a  space  which  is  begin- 
ning to  be  now  looked  on  as  only  relatively  independent 
of  the  observer,  or  the  standpoints  to  which  observation 
generally  is  found  to  be  confined  in  its  results  by  the 
limited  character  of  the  conceptions  applied.  Separation 
in  standpoint,  or  in  order  and  level  in  knowledge,  is 
thus  tending  to  supersede  the  notion  of  separation  in 
existence. 

The  form  which  this  change  assumes  is  the  importance 
now  attached  to  interpretation  or  meaning  in  the  con- 
stitution of  experience.  Nature  lies  before  us  with  the 
significance  we  ascribe  to  it  indissolubly  incorporated  with 
all  the  rest  of  its  character.  The  tests  and  standards  of 
truth  are  as  inexorably  applied  as  ever,  but  they  are 
differently  expressed.  My  individual  mind  does  not 
create  nature.  Rather  does  it  belong  to  nature  as  a  part 
of  it.  But,  as  we  shall  see  later,  its  significance  as  so 
belonging  requires  careful  definition.  From  one  stand- 
point, interpreted  in  the  conceptions  appropriate  to  that 
standpoint,  it  may  well  appear  to  be  just  a  thing  or  an 
event  within  nature.  But  this,  as  we  shall  also  see  later 
on,  is  no  exhaustive  or  adequate  description  of  the  full 
character  of  what  we  really  imply  when  we  speak  of  our 
minds.  It  is  not  simply  for  my  mind  that  nature  is  what 
it  is.  Doubtless  there  is  always  a  certain  relativity  to  the 
individual.  To  my  dog,  whose  mental  equipment  is  other 
than  mine,  the  world  as  it  exists  is  a  more  limited  one 
than  it  is  for  me.  Beauty,  for  example,  apparently  does 
not  belong  to  it  for  him.  Now  this  is  the  case,  if  to  a  less 
extent,  even  as  between  men.  The  artist  and  the  man  of 
science  are  aware  of  what  others  are  not  aware  of.  Still, 
they,  like  other  men  and  the  dog,  seem  to  start  from  a 


LOCKE  AND   BERKELEY  21 

that,"  the  "  what  "  of  which  is  the  varying 
content  that  gives  meaning,  and  reality  not  less,  to  their 
experiences.  But  this  content  is  inseparable  from  inter- 
pretation. Even  printed  words  are  only  insignificant 
splashes  of  ink  excepting  so  far  as  I  can  read  them.  The 
old  idea  was  that  the  meaning  must  be  something  quite 
separate  from  that  of  which  it  was  the  meaning.  But 
closer  study  has  raised  questions  about  this. 

Locke  had  treated  meaning  as  being  separable  from 
experience  when  he  distinguished  primary  qualities,  such 
as  those  of  extension  in  space,  from  secondary  qualities, 
such  as  colour,  and  had  insisted  on  the  former  as  belonging 
to  the  thing  perceived,  and  the  latter  as  belonging  only 
to  another  thing,  the  mind  that  perceived  it.  Berkeley 
carried  this  further  when  he  refused  to  distinguish  the 
allocation  of  the  two  kinds  of  quality.  For  he  declared 
that  all  our  experience  told  us  was  that  our  minds,  as 
spiritual  substances  of  some  sort,  were  aware  of  their 
own  sensations  and  ideas,  and  that  these  were  to  be 
looked  on  as  self-subsistent  signs  through  which  a  deity 
informed  us  of  the  nature  of  a  world  which  arose  in 
virtue  of  his  having  so  ordered  these  ideas.  The  actual 
experience  was  thus  isolated  from  its  meaning.  Because 
the  ideas  thus  regarded  in  themselves  could  tell  us  nothing 
intelligible,  either  of  the  nature  of  the  spiritual  substances 
named  minds  or  of  the  deity  who  acted  on  them,  the 
Berkeleian  theory  was  easily  torn  to  pieces  in  the  hands 
of  Hume.  If  sensations  and  ideas  were  self-contained 
entities,  and  their  relations  were  merely  external  and  acci- 
dental to  their  self-contained  character,  then  the  relations 
could  have  no  necessary  validity,  and  the  unity  and 
apparently  compelling  character  of  knowledge  were  illu- 
sions, the  results  of  habit  and  the  association  of  ideas,  and 
were  wholly  unreliable.  The  precipice  of  scepticism  thus 
began  to  loom  very  close  at  hand,  and  the  only  question 
of  difficulty  that  remained  was  how,  if  our  knowledge 
could  in  reality  amount  to  no  more  than  this,  such  a 
pretence  at  knowledge  could  ever  have  conducted  us  to 
any  consciousness  of  the  reality  of  the  precipice. 

It  was  of  the  question  so  raised  that  Kant  laid  hold. 
I  refer  to  him,  not  for  the  purpose  of  discussing  his  system 
at  this  point,  but  only  to  draw  attention  to  what  I  believe 
to  be  the  case,  that  he  is  the  father  of  what  is  new 


22  THE  DOMAIN   OF  SCIENCE 

beginning  to  be  recognised  by  the  scientific  thought  of  our 
time  as  the  view  implied  by  its  methods. 

Kant  was  unable  to  find  a  solution  of  the  problem  of 
the  real  in  the  notion  of  experience  as  a  collection  in  time 
and  space  of  isolated  entities,  existing  independently  of 
their  relations,  and  apart  from  a  setting  in  some  frame- 
work of  meaning  which  would  make  these  relations  essen- 
tial to  the  existence  of  the  entities.  For  him  the  work  of 
science  lay  in  interpretation,  and  interpretation  could 
signify  no  more  than  the  finding  of  the  true  meaning.  In 
what,  then,  did  the  meaning  of  our  actual  experience 
consist?  Although  Kant's  solution  of  this  problem  was 
only  a  partial  one,  it  is  not  the  less  highly  instructive 
to-day.  He  threw  overboard  the  easy-going  assumption 
that  it  will  do  to  look  on  the  mind  as  a  self-contained 
thing  confronted  in  experience  by  another  self-contained 
thing.  Going  behind  such  thinghood  he  sought  for  an 
explanation  of  the  relationship  in  the  inclusion  of  both 
under  a  totally  different  conception,  indicative  of  a  mode 
of  actuality  that  was  quite  different.  When  we  perceive, 
Kant  held  that  we  are  more  than  we  appear  to  ourselves 
to  be.  What  is  really  constructive  of  our  object-world 
is  intelligence,  and  this  is  more  than  merely  individual. 
Intelligence  which  introduces  significance  into  its  object 
is  the  very  condition  which  is  implied  for  the  possibility 
of  experience,  and  it  must  therefore  be  the  identical 
knowledge  of  all  individuals  in  so  far  as  they  have  experi- 
ence. In  two  pure  forms  of  perception,  or  of  what  he  called 
intuition,  time  and  space,  its  activity  arranges  in  rela- 
tions, or  schematises,  the  raw  material  of  sensation,  which 
comes  to  it  from  things  in  themselves,  into  an  orderly 
world,  thus  arising  independently  of  our  individual  partici- 
pation. Within  experience  so  constituted  the  particular 
mind  so  encounters  an  object  that  is  independent  of 
itself  as  a  merely  particular  personality.  The  object  is 
in  this  fashion  independent  of  the  mind,  inasmuch  as  it 
falls  within  a  larger  process  than  that  of  merely  individual 
knowledge.  The  individual  mind  itself  arises  as  the 
outcome  of  the  process,  while  at  the  same  time,  although 
itself  an  object  in  experience,  it  is  more  than  this  because 
it  expresses  the  process  in  which  it  appears  to  itself  as  a 
result. 

This  was  Kant's  theory  of  nature.     It  showed  a  great 


KANT  23 

advance  in  capacity  for  explaining  the  facts  of  objectivity 
over  that  of  Berkeley.  For,  in  the  first  place,  inasmuch 
as  all  experience  owed  its  structure  to  mind  as  its  foun- 
dation, the  laws  of  that  structure,  as  being  put  into  it  by 
mind  itself,  must  be  universally  and  of  necessity  true.  It 
lay  in  this  fashion  in  the  very  nature  of  experience  that 
two  and  two  should  make  four ;  that  the  square  of  the 
hypotenuse  of  a  right-angled  triangle  should  be  equal 
to  the  squares  of  the  other  sides;  and  that  every  event 
should  have  a  cause.  These  things  were  deducible  from 
the  underlying  conditions  of  every  possible  experience, 
and  within  such  experience  they  were  of  necessity  every- 
where valid.  On  the  other  hand  they  were  true,  not  of 
what  did  not  come  into  our  experience  and  therefore  was 
not  thus  constructed,  but  only  of  experience  and  within 
its  limits.  At  the  character  of  God,  and  of  objects  con- 
ceived as  lying  beyond  experience,  we  could  not  get  by 
perception.  These  remained  ideals  due  to  reflection,  and 
their  reality  was  not  to  be  apprehended  in  what  we  could 
experience.  This  was  true  also  of  ends  and  artistic  ideals. 
For  the  forms  in  which,  for  Kant,  the  activity  of  mind 
operated  in  the  constitution  of  its  objective  world,  were 
of  a  mechanistic  character,  and  did  not  include  such  non- 
mechanistic  forms  of  knowledge. 

Kant's  method  laid  new  foundations  for  the  principle 
of  objectivity  in  nature.  For  he  had  rescued  this  from 
the  particularism  of  Berkeley  and  the  latter's  divorce  of 
what  alone  the  senses  make  us  aware  of  from  its  far- 
reaching  significance  as  experienced.  For  Kant  the  mind 
found  as  there  in  nature  what  was  of  its  own  character 
and  content,  in  objective  form.  In  a  measure,  to  be 
intelligible  was  for  Kant  to  be  real,  and  to  be  real  was  to 
be  intelligible.  For  meaning  was  everywhere  incorporated 
in  reality.  But  people  presently  began  to  ask  why  Kant 
had  limited  his  categories  to  those  of  a  mechanical  order, 
and  why  time  and  space  were  put  on  a  different  footing 
from  the  other  factors  involved  in  knowledge,  by  being 
made  mere  forms  of  intuition  instead  of  being  given  a 
conceptual  character,  like  number  and  causality.  It  was 
presently  declared  that  Kant  had  committed  a  cardinal 
error  in  really  trying  to  go  behind  the  fact  of  knowledge 
and  to  break  it  up.  It  was  asked  how  it  could  be,  if 
knowledge  was  the  only  mode  of  approach  to  facts,  and 


24  THE  DOMAIN  OF  SCIENCE 

was  itself  presupposed  in  all  attempts  at  investigation 
even  of  itself,  that  its  validity  could  have  been  properly 
called  in  question  in  this  Critical  Philosophy.  To  try  to 
question  the  instrument  through  which  alone  questions 
can  be  realised  and  answered  is  to  commit  the  fallacy  of 
the  sceptics,  who,  if  consistent,  ought  in  limine  to  deny 
the  possibility  of  reliable  scepticism.  We  cannot  learn 
to  swim  excepting  by  entering  the  water,  and  trusting 
ourselves  to  it.  We  must  trust  ourselves  to  knowledge 
simply  because  there  is  no  way  of  doing  anything  else. 
The  only  mode  of  studying  knowledge  is,  therefore,  the 
observation  of  it  in  its  own  self -development.  It  cannot 
be  broken  up  into  fragments,  for  there  is  nothing  beyond 
it  of  which  such  fragments  can  consist.  Therefore  Kant 
was  not  justified  in  trying  to  lay  it  out  on  the  dissecting 
table  for  dismemberment.  The  distinctions  between 
thought,  time  and  space,  and  sensation,  cannot  be  funda- 
mental. They  must  fall  within  one  entirety,  and  it  is  as 
belonging  to  that  entirety  as  its  phases,  and  not  as  entities 
apart,  that  they  must  be  studied. 

Such  a  view  of  the  real  must  take  account  of  the  knower 
as  well  as  the  known,  if  it  is  to  be  a  complete  philosophy. 
But  when  we  distinguish,  as  we  must  do  for  the  limited 
purposes  of  daily  life,  nature  as  known,  from  the  percipient 
for  which  it  is  there,  we  form  a  conception  of  the  world 
confronting  us  as  self-contained  and  as  if  "  closed  to 
mind."  Such  a  conception  is  legitimate  only  if  we  re- 
member that  it  depends  on  a  standpoint  which  will  prove 
not  to  be  a  final  one.  There  may  have  to  be  a  yet  fuller 
conception,  belonging  to  a  different  standpoint  in  know- 
ledge, a  conception  within  which  both  mind  and  nature 
can  be  shown  to  fall.  But  it  is  legitimate,  if  we  bear  in 
mind  that  the  actual  standpoint  is  just  that  of  an  observer 
face  to  face  with  a  world  which  he  provisionally  accepts 
as  there  independently  of  his  observation,  to  confine 
ourselves  to  what  we  take  to  be  revealed  in  perception, 
though  relatively  only,  the  presence  of  nature  as  an 
apparently  self-contained  system.  Now  in  science,  strictly 
so  called,  we  observe  and  experiment  with  a  view  to 
determining  the  general  notions  involved  in  the  descrip- 
tions of  things  so  taken. 

In  nature  thus  conceived  we  make  no  distinction  such 
as  that  between  secondary  and  primary  qualities.  We 


NATURE  25 

take  it  to  be  an  entirety  as  it  stands.  Every  phase  belongs 
to  the  entirety  and  is  a  factor  in  it.  Interpretation  and 
standpoint  are  accordingly  inseparable  from  what  is  inter- 
preted. This  is  easy  to  see  when  we  turn  to  objects  in 
nature,  such  as  a  sunset,  which  owe  their  important 
significance  as  facts  to  the  artistic  consciousness  of  the 
observer.  The  sunset  in  its  beauty  is  not  the  less  real 
because  for  the  man  of  science,  who  from  another  stand- 
point, puts  a  different  interpretation  on  it,  its  reality 
means  something  quite  else.  So  with  the  picture  that 
hangs  on  the  wall.  From  one  point  of  view  it  is  merely 
a  disorderly  mixture  of  colours  spread  over  a  canvas. 
From  a  different  point  of  view  it  expresses  meaning 
which  is  not  the  less  real  because  it  requires,  to  give  it 
existence,  mind  of  a  certain  order.  The  printed  words 
which  we  interpret  as  expressing  a  poetic  idea  are  in  the 
same  case.  The  words  embody  a  poem,  although  to 
another  view  they  are  merely  so  many  smears  of  printer's 
ink  or  even  dirt.  For  a  dog  they  are  only  something  to 
chew.  The  world  before  me  would  lose  half  its  reality 
did  it  not  yield  meaning  for  mind  at  the  level  that  is 
required  to  apprehend  that  meaning  as  among  integral 
phases  of  the  existence  of  the  world  at  that  level. 

When  we  turn  from  aspects,  such  as  beauty  and  ends 
expressed,  to  those  of  mere  mechanism,  the  same  truth 
confronts  us.  Every  man  has  some  science  in  him 
through  which  the  world  is  present  in  the  ordered  mechani- 
cal aspect  it  wears.  Even  the  animal  that  discriminates 
what  is  useful  to  it  from  what  is  noxious  seems  to  bring 
reflection  and  memory  to  bear.  We  human  beings  think 
abstractly  by  the  aid,  for  instance,  of  geometrical  figures 
or  of  arithmetical  numbers,  and,  by  bringing  our  so-called 
immediate  world  under  these  conceptions,  we  extend  its 
significance  and  the  range  of  our  inferences  over  those  of 
the  animal.  It  is  further  true  that  the  mathematician, 
the  physicist,  the  chemist,  the  biologist,  the  artist,  the 
clergyman,  the  metaphysician,  all  abstract  from,  or,  in 
other  words,  ignore,  the  phases  of  the  real  that  do  not 
concern  their  respective  purposes,  in  order  to  get  distinct 
and  extended  knowledge  about  the  aspects  of  things  that 
are  important  to  them,  and  to  find  out  what  their  reality 
signifies.  Within  each  order  of  approach  to  significance 
in  what  is  apprehended  fresh  truth  emerges  and  reality 


26  THE  DOMAIN   OF  SCIENCE 

is  invested  with  fresh  meaning.  The  truth  that  emerges 
is  not  in  each  case  of  the  same  order.  Its  standards,  as 
we  have  already  seen,  vary  with  the  order  and  the  stand- 
point to  which  alone  they  are  appropriate.  Of  these 
standpoints  there  may  be  more  than  one  employed 
in  the  direction  of  the  activity  of  knowledge.  Within  each 
there  will  be  the  truth  and  error  that  belong  to  it,  and 
within  each  the  criterion  will  prove,  as  the  case  may  be, 
to  be  of  the  strenuous  order  of  science,  or  of  the  com- 
pelling character  of  unquestionable  value  recognised,  or 
of  some  even  different  character.  It  is  not  independent 
entities  that  we  discriminate  in  these  different  phases  of 
the  actual,  but  aspects  arising  from  the  points  of  view 
we  are  at.  There  may  in  an  actual  and  individual  phase 
of  our  experience  be  many  aspects  present,  and  there 
may  be  required  as  many  kinds  of  knowledge  as  are 
appropriate  to  each  aspect.  In  certain  of  these  kinds  of 
knowledge  the  scientific  methods  of  abstraction  will 
predominate.  In  others  what  matters  will  be  the  idea  of 
excellence  in  value.  In  the  latter  cases  the  idea  may 
seem  to  us  to  be  indistinguishable  even  in  reflection  from 
the  object,  and  the  judgment  of  excellence  will  be  of  a 
character  so  immediate  and  simple  that  it  will  seem  to 
amount  to  no  more  than  a  feeling  aesthetic,  ethical,  or 
religious.  But  it  is  not  really  so,  for  no  such  feeling  is 
possible  unless,  by  mental  quality  of  a  reflective  kind  such 
as  distinguishes  the  man  from  the  animal,  the  mind  is 
rendered  capable  of  the  judgment  of  excellence.  Thought 
and  feeling  are  never  separable  in  what  is  actual.  The 
one  may  appear  to  be  suggested  more  prominently  than 
the  other,  but  both  are  invariably  present.  For  the  dis- 
tinction between  them  is  itself  a  creature  of  reflection. 
This  is  shown  by  what  has  been  said  about  man  :  that  he 
alone  in  the  animal  kingdom  is  capable  of  religion. 

The  principle  is  one  that  distinguishes  broadly  the 
views  of  thinkers  like  Kant  from  those  of  the  school  of 
Berkeley  and  Hume.  Nothing  is  real  for  us  apart  from 
meaning,  and  the  meaning  is  not  separable  from  the  "  It  " 
which  we  perceive.  We  may  of  course  attribute  wrong 
meanings.  The  mind  of  man  is  free,  free  to  err  and  free 
to  sin.  But  there  are  standards  of  truth  of  different 
forms  which  develop  with  the  development  of  knowledge. 
By  the  aid  of  these  we  free  our  minds  from  interpreta- 


OUR  KNOWLEDGE  OF  NATURE  27 

tions  which  are  aberrations  from  the  normal,  merely  due 
to  the  idiosyncrasies  of  the  individual  within  each  order 
of  truth.  They  enable  us  to  distinguish  what  is  true  for 
all  men  from  what  is  the  subjective  belief  of  one  or  a  few 
only.  They  even  enable  us  to  pass  beyond  a  traditional 
opinion,  and  to  recognise  it  as  subjective  and  individual 
in  its  origin,  and  as  not  conforming  to  the  conditions 
which  alone  make  experience  possible.  Thus,  while 
knowledge  never  stands  still  and  is  always  being  developed, 
it  may  take  time  and  repeated  testing  to  discriminate  the 
true  character  of  what  is  believed  to  be  knowledge.  This 
does  not  imply  that  truth  varies  with  the  individual ;  it 
varies,  but  in  accordance  with  principles  of  universal 
application.  When  we  apprehend  truly  the  nature  of 
the  object  of  knowledge  we  apprehend  something  that 
is  independent  of  our  private  outlook.  There  is  no  diffi- 
culty in  coming  to  this  conclusion ;  the  difficulty  is  as  to 
what  it  signifies. 

It  is,  as  we  have  seen,  only  on  the  basis  of  accepting 
knowledge  as  an  ultimate  and  final  fact,  in  terms  of  which 
all  that  is  apparently  subjective,  error  as  well  as  truth, 
must  be  rendered,  and  within  which  all  that  is  or  can  be 
must  somewhere  fall,  that  our  object- world  is  intelligible, 
Now  it  is  just  this  consideration  that  delivers  us  from  the 
puzzle  that  arises  when  we  hastily  assume  knowledge  to 
be  merely  our  knowledge  as  particular  beings.  We  are 
at  once  forced  to  inquire  whether  knowledge  is  not  more 
than  this.  Kant,  as  we  have  noticed,  denied  that  know- 
ledge was  a  mere  attribute  of  the  empirical  self  that 
belongs  to  its  object-world.  He  asserted  it  to  be  that 
which  lies  at  the  foundation  of  the  self,  and  of  the  object 
equally,  as  well  as  of  the  relation  of  the  two.  From  some 
view  of  knowledge  such  as  this  it  seems  impossible  to 
escape.  For  it  is,  on  the  one  hand,  the  way  of  deliverance 
from  subjectivity,  and,  on  the  other,  it  accounts  for  our 
consciousness  of  an  objectivity  that  is  independent  of  the 
particular  self  that  perceives.  Kant's  view  thus  gives  us 
the  "  It  "  of  which  we  are  in  search.  Reality  lies  in  the 
foundational  character  of  knowledge,  and  in  the  dis- 
tinctions between  perceiver  and  perceived,  knower  and 
known,  as  being  distinctions  falling  inside  the  entirety  of 
that  foundational  character,  inasmuch  as  they  are  made 
by  and  within  knowledge  itself. 


28  THE   DOMAIN  OF  SCIENCE 

The  point  is  one  which  will  be  developed  later  on.  It 
is  a  point  of  no  easy  character.  But  then  the  problem 
of  reality  is  a  very  difficult  one,  perhaps  the  most  difficult 
of  all  problems,  and  it  is  only  when  we  are  driven  to  face 
it  that  we  ever  do  so.  Now  here  we  are  driven  to  face 
the  problem,  because,  unless  we  can  find  a  solution  for  it, 
we  can  hardly  hope  to  get  at  a  principle  such  that  it  can 
free  us  from  perplexity  over  a  multitude  of  other  problems 
which  press  on  us  ominously.  It  is  suggested  that  our 
knowledge,  when  we  perceive  an  object,  is  a  relation  which 
is  somehow  established  between  it  and  us,  just  as  if  we 
were  only  living  things  possessing  a  special  and  individual 
attribute  of  being  able  to  know.  But  if  that  suggestion 
is  based  on  an  hypothesis  assumed  to  be  true  but  incapable 
of  being  formulated  intelligibly,  we  are  driven  to  inquire 
whether  the  hypothesis  is  tenable.  It  may  be  not  only 
an  apparently  plausible  but  a  useful  one,  useful  for 
application  when  we  do  not  need  more  than  the  aspect 
of  reality  which  it  yields.  But  it  may  not  the  less  be 
profoundly  false,  if  it  claims  to  be  a  principle  by  which  we 
can  explain,  if  we  wish  to  go  deeper  into  the  nature  of 
existence. 

I  cannot  at  this  early  stage  do  more  than  state  the 
alternative  principle.  It  is  no  novel  one.  It  belongs  to 
the  essence  of  the  metaphysics  both  of  the  greatest  of 
the  Grecian  thinkers  and  of  the  most  modern  idealists.  If 
it  is  a  true  one  it  is  only  because  of  a  profound  misappre- 
hension that  we  seek  to  resolve  knowledge  into  a  relation 
between  self-subsisting  entities,  or  indeed  into  anything 
other  than  itself  in  its  many  forms  and  aspects.  For, 
should  it  prove  to  be  the  case  that  behind  the  fact  of 
knowledge  we  cannot  go,  and  that  all  criticism  of  its 
truth  or  untruth  falls  within  itself  and  must  be  wholly 
its  own  act,  then  it  is  obviously  absurd  to  treat  it  as  an 
activity  of  a  particular  being  in  space  and  time.  It  is 
in  a  larger  view  the  medium  within  which  all  experience 
lies,  and  the  self  is  its  expression,  but  never  its  complete 
expression.  For  the  self  is  finite,  although,  just  because 
of  its  character  as  an  organ  in  which  knowledge  expresses 
itself,  it  is  at  all  times  more  than  it  takes  itself  to  be. 

It  is  in  the  dubious  fashion  I  have  referred  to  that  the 
relation  of  the  intelligent  human  being  to  the  object 
which  he  perceives  is  sometimes  regarded  as  belonging  to 


KNOWLEDGE   A   FINAL  FACT  29 

the  order  of  thought  concerned  with  externality.  That  is 
because  both  his  mind  and  his  object  are  taken  to  be  things 
or  substances,  legitimately  from  many  standpoints,  but 
legitimately  only  from  these  standpoints,  and  in  the  light 
of  such  conceptions  as  properly  belong  to  them.  But  if 
we  reconsider  the  assumption  here  tacitly  made,  that  we, 
as  individual  men  with  names  and  positions  in  space,  ought 
to  be  taken  first  in  the  proper  order  of  reflection  about 
reality,  and  that  the  fact  that  we  know  may  be  taken 
only  in  the  second  place,  a  different  conclusion  seems  to 
force  itself  on  us.  The  subject  as  distinguished  in  know- 
ledge from  the  object  can  hardly  be  regarded  as  a  self- 
subsisting  substance,  but  is  surely  just  itself  a  form  that 
arises  within  knowledge.  The  object  appears  to  be  simi- 
larly just  another  form,  the  corresponding  and  correlative 
result  of  the  distinction.  The  activity  of  knowledge  in 
making  the  distinction  is  thus  in  truth  prior  to  the  results 
distinguished.  One  of  these  results  is  that  knowledge 
assumes  for  itself  the  aspect  of  a  subject  or  self,  so  dis- 
tinguished and  yet  expressive  of  the  activity  of  knowledge 
itself.  It  is  related  within  the  final  fact  of  knowledge  to 
an  object  which  belongs  to  knowledge  as  much  as  the 
self  belongs  to  it,  and  is  its  correlative  reality  within  the 
entirety.  Thus  an  object  is  not  merely  naturally  but 
essentially  there  for  the  subject,  not  only  in  space  and 
time,  but  in  consciousness.  Behind  the  fact  of  conscious- 
ness one  cannot  go.  It  is  our  "  that  "  of  which  we  can 
only  inquire  into  the  "  what."  The  "  what  "  is  always 
self -changing,  for  knowledge  is  dynamic  and  not  static. 
But  still  in  some  form  it  always  occupies  us.  What  the 
form  is,  in  the  case  of  object  and  subject  alike,  is  a  question 
that  turns  on  standpoints  and  orders  in  conception  result- 
ing from  them,  and  of  these  the  character  of  knowledge 
discloses  in  its  self -development  an  unlimited  variety. 
The  point  is  therefore  that  at  the  foundation  of  these 
standpoints,  implied  in  them  and  capable  of  expression 
in  all  and  each  of  the  multiple  presentations  to  which 
they  give  rise,  is  the  cardinal  and  irresoluble  reality  of 
knowledge  itself,  the  ultimate  medium  in  terms  of  which 
all  else  must  be  expressed,  whilst  it  cannot  itself  be 
expressed  in  any  terms  beyond  its  own. 

It  is  this  view  of  knowledge,  different  from  that  yielded 
by  the  artificial  and  subordinate  standpoint  from  which 
4 


30  THE  DOMAIN  OF  SCIENCE 

the  psychologist  sometimes  has  to  treat  it,  that  renders 
not  only  the  relativity  of  its  isolated  phases  but  also  the 
merely  relative  truth  of  these  phases  intelligible.  If  it 
is  a  correct  view,  then  the  question  of  what  underlies  know- 
ledge and  gives  rise  to  it  is  one  which  is  unintelligible  and 
absurd.  Neither  what  we  call  minds  nor  what  we  call 
things  know.  They  are  themselves  objects  within  the 
knowledge  which  has  aspects  that  in  order  of  reality 
precede  and  go  beyond  them.  Things  are  therefore  out 
there  just  as  they  appear  to  be,  independently  of  me  the 
individual  knower,  although  they  have  had  attributed  to 
them  aspects  in  reality  of  a  relative  order.  Such  aspects 
are  the  inevitably  incomplete  expressions  of  the  founda- 
tional  knowledge  within  which  alone  such  aspects  them- 
selves arise. 

If  this  be  true  we  have  accounted  for  the  fact  that  there 
is  an  "  It,"  and  are  already  a  long  way  from  Mentalism  or 
Subjective  Idealism.  The  question  of  the  genesis  of 
knowledge  as  related  to  any  other  reality  turns  out  to  be 
irrational.  But  the  "  It  "  has  its  meaning  or  interpreta- 
tion as  part  of  its  reality.  So,  in  his  way,  Kant  held,  and 
he  would  appear  to  have  been  right  as  against  Berkeley 
and  Hume,  who  sought  to  obliterate  what  was  essential 
in  that  meaning. 

Before  concluding  this  chapter  and  approaching  its 
principles  at  a  further  stage,  it  is  worth  while  to  restate  its 
conclusion  in  another  form. 

The  final  and  foundational  fact  appears  to  be  the  fact 
that  I  know.  For  it  is  in  terms  of  knowledge  that  all 
existence  is  expressed.  Excepting  for  knowledge  nothing 
has  any  meaning,  and  to  have  no  meaning  is  to  be  non- 
existent. 

Obvious  as  this  seems  it  is  yet  a  conclusion  which  meets 
at  once  with  an  objection.  The  plain  person  refuses  to 
accept  it  on  the  ground  that  it  is  not  his  thinking  about 
them  that  calls  things  into  existence.  He  is  clearly  right 
when  he  says  this.  But  does  his  objection  affect  the  con- 
clusion against  which  it  is  directed  ?  On  one  construction  it 
does  so.  If  the  last  word  about  knowledge  is  that  its  object 
is  to  be  looked  at  as  a  property  of  a  particular  mind 
with  a  particular  place  in  space  and  time,  the  objection 
seems  unanswerable.  Dr.  Johnson,  however,  answered  this 
construction  long  ago  when,  in  comment  on  Bishop  Berkeley, 


THE   SELF  31 

he  thumped  his  stick  upon  the  ground.  The  ground  was  of 
course  just  as  much  an  actual  fact  as  was  his  individual 
mind. 

Nor  does  the  difficulty  Dr.  Johnson  felt  seem  to  be 
made  less  by  Berkeley's  suggestion  that  there  is  some 
other  sort  of  mind  than  that  of  the  inquirer  in  the  know- 
ledge of  which  reality  can  be  sought.  For  it  is  not  easy 
to  see  in  what  relation  the  inquirer's  mind,  that  of  a 
person  with  a  history  and  a  position  in  nature,  can  stand 
to  such  another  mind  if  it  be  something  outside  his  own. 

The  problem  remains  unsolved.  It  is  only  in  terms  of 
knowledge  that  reality  can  be  expressed,  and  knowledge 
can  be  described  in  no  terms  that  go  beyond  its  own. 
Even  the  distinction  between  reality  and  unreality  is  one 
within  thought  itself.  The  only  way  out  of  the  puzzle 
seems  therefore  to  retrace  our  steps,  and  to  ask  whether 
at  some  point  we  have  made  an  assumption  that  has 
precipitated  us  into  our  difficulty.  Now  there  was  an 
assumption  that  is  obvious.  On  the  older  hypothesis  we 
took  knowledge  to  be  a  property  of  the  particular  self 
that  is  asking  the  question  about  it.  No  doubt  from  one 
point  of  view,  and  one  that  is  not  only  legitimate  but 
necessary,  this  is  so.  But  is  it  the  only  possible  point  of 
view  ?  Surely  not.  For  the  self  is  not  less  than  any 
thing  else  an  object  for  knowledge.  That  is  to  say,  it  pre- 
supposes the  ultimate  fact  of  knowledge  if  it  is  to  have 
any  meaning  at  all,  and  in  logic,  at  all  events,  knowledge 
comes  first.  Is  it,  then,  open  to  us  to  proceed  on  the 
footing  that  the  self  is  a  notion  that  has  arisen  within 
knowledge  and  is  derivative  from  it  ?  If  so,  knowledge  may 
turn  out  to  have  been  the  ultimate  fact  and  the  foundation 
of  the  universe  for  which  we  are  in  search. 

There  is  one  possible  view  which  leaves  such  a  con- 
clusion open  to  us.  It  is  that  the  common  idea  of  a  self 
with  which  undoubtedly  knowledge  is  somehow  in  inti- 
mate association  as  its  property,  is  a  conception  that  is 
only  relatively  an  adequate  one.  Of  conceptions  that  are 
only  relatively  adequate  there  are  many  examples.  One 
of  the  most  familiar  is  that  of  a  living  organism.  We 
can  and  do  in  our  daily  practice  treat  it  as  so  many  pounds 
weight  of  carbon  and  other  atoms  and  molecules,  arranged 
in  accordance  with  the  principles  of  physics  and  chemistry. 
So  far  this  is  a  true  view.  The  law  of  the  conservation  of 


82  THE  DOMAIN   OF  SCIENCE 

energy  applies  to  the  living  organism.  But  this  concep- 
tion of  it  is  not  the  whole  truth  nor  adequate  truth.  For 
the  organism  is  living,  and  its  character  can  only  be  fully 
expressed  in  terms  of  life.  So  expressed  it  consists  in 
growth,  heredity,  and  generally  in  behaviour  in  the 
unconscious  fulfilment  of  an  end,  resembling  the  pursuit 
of  a  purpose  realised  by  the  component  parts.  The  sub- 
stance is  always  changing,  but  the  end  persists  until  its 
function  in  the  interest  of  the  species  terminates  with 
death.  The  end  is  no  physical  or  chemical  cause,  acting 
ab  extra.  It  is  the  quasi-purposive  behaviour  of  the  con- 
stituent organs,  such  as  the  lungs  and  the  kidneys,  which 
adapt  their  work  in  apparent  concert  for  the  preservation 
of  a  whole  that,  in  so  far  as  it  is  so  preserved,  lives  and 
controls  the  action  of  its  organs  in  accordance  with  its 
requirements. 

Thus  the  physical  and  chemical  standpoint  is  only 
relatively  true,  however  useful  and  necessary  for  getting 
clear  and  extended  knowledge  belonging  to  a  certain 
order  in  reflection.  The  standpoint  of  biology,  with  the 
conceptions  it  employs,  is  no  less  necessary,  and  is  certainly 
not  less  obvious  and  natural  in  our  daily  attitude.  The 
two  outlooks  do  not  conflict,  because  they  belong  to 
different  orders  in  thought,  employing  ideas  that  are  in 
logic  of  diverse  kinds.  Reality  presents  itself  at  two 
different  levels. 

Now  it  may  be  that  we  shall  find  that  the  self  analo- 
gously presents  itself  differently  at  different  standpoints 
belonging  to  different  orders  in  reflection,  and  that  it  has 
only  been  relatively  that  the  self  has  appeared  as  sort  of 
substance  of  which  knowledge  was  an  instrument,  by 
means  of  which  the  mind  so  conceived  got  at  things  thus 
looked  on  as  existing  outside  and  wholly  independently  of 
its  knowledge  about  them.  We  shall  have  in  this  book  to 
examine  that  question,  along  with  others  that  arise  out 
of  it. 

I  have  now  led  the  reader,  as  he  may  think  precipitately, 
into  an  early  discussion  of  what  must  be  the  cardinal 
question  for  philosophy.  But  I  have  done  this  in  order 
to  make  what  follows  intelligible,  and  to  enable  me  to  pass 
to  the  general  principle  of  the  relativity  of  knowledge. 


CHAPTER   III 

RELATIVITY   AND   WHAT  IT  MEANS 

THE  principle  of  relativity,  if  its  beginning  is  sought  for, 
will  be  found  to  date  back  to  the  days  of  ancient  Greece. 
Plato  and  Aristotle  were  aware  of  it  and  of  its  far-reaching 
importance.  Later  on  Plotinus  was  occupied  with  it.  It 
recurs  in  subsequent  periods  of  the  history  of  thought 
about  reality*  What  seems  to  be  needed  in  our  own  day 
is  not  merely  its  statement  in  a  form  adapted  to  our 
times,  but  its  rescue  from  obscurity,  arising  from  uncon- 
scious assumptions  and  distorting  metaphors.  Almost 
every  great  philosopher  of  ancient  and  modern  times  has 
had  his  attention  directed  to  the  principle  in  some  form, 
but  it  is  to-day  that  there  has  come  to  it  for  the  first  time 
a  chance  of  obtaining  from  science  itself  full  scope.  For 
it  has  at  last  penetrated  definitely  into  the  .domain  of 
science.  Leibnitz  and  Kant  came  near  to  touching  on  its 
application  in  this  region,  although  in  their  times  that 
application  would  have  been  regarded,  and  not  unnatur- 
ally, as  matter  for  philosophy  by  itself.  But  now  science 
has  begun  to  scrutinise  its  own  foundations,  and  to  apply 
its  own  methods  in  the  investigation.  It  is  in  this 
fashion  that  the  researches  of  Einstein  have  given  a  fresh 
importance  to  the  principle  of  relativity.  The  precise 
standards  and  the  exact  reasoning  of  the  most  modern 
mathematicians  and  physicists  are  throwing  a  new  light 
on  the  significance  of  the  principle.  Apart  from  their 
work  it  is  impossible  to-day  to  state  it  adequately  or  to 
appreciate  its  range.  Men  of  science  are  now  advancing 
with  sure  steps  into  a  domain  which  for  long  they  did  not 
think  of  entering.  It  is  not  a  domain  that  can  belong  to 
them  alone.  In  this  borderland  they  are  bound  to  meet  the 

33 


84  RELATIVITY   AND   WHAT   IT   MEANS 

metaphysician.  It  may  turn  out  that  they  need  him  just 
as  he  needs  them.  For  the  principle  itself  is  one  of 
which  they  can  have  no  monopoly.  It  does  not  apply 
only  in  physical  science,  or  only  in  philosophy  in  relation 
to  that  kind  of  science.  As  we  shall  find,  it  is  one  that 
is  required  in  other  departments,  belonging  not  only  to 
science  itself,  but  to  art  and  religion  and  knowledge 
generally. 

It  is  therefore  necessary,  if  the  principle  is  to  have  its 
scope  fully  interpreted,  to  follow  out  its  application  in  a 
good  many  regions.  This  I  have  sought  to  do  so  far  as 
I  have  felt  able.  It  is  unwillingly  that  I  have  even 
touched  on  topics  with  which  highly  trained  specialists 
alone  are  competent  to  deal  in  detail.  I  know  too  well 
from  my  own  practical  experience  in  hearing  legal  argu- 
ments how  quickly  the  deficiencies  of  the  outsider  become 
obvious  to  a  trained  eye.  But,  then,  the  principle  of  the 
relativity  of  knowledge  does  not  itself  belong  to  any  single 
domain.  Einstein's  teaching  is  only  an  illustration  of  its 
application  to  a  special  subject.  To  interpret  the  principle 
itself  it  is  necessary  to  examine  the  character  of  knowledge 
as  a  whole,  and  in  doing  this  it  is  not  practicable  to  avoid 
looking  at  the  various  regions  in  which  this  great  principle 
in  knowledge  discloses  itself. 

I  have  thought  it  right  thus  to  explain  why  I  have 
found  myself  compelled  to  touch  topics  which  should  be 
dealt  with  as  a  rule  only  by  those  who  are  highly  trained 
specialists.  I  have  avoided,  as  far  as  was  possible,  any 
suggestion  that  encroaches  on  their  work.  Where  I  may 
seem  to  have  ventured  to  speak  boldly  it  has  been  because 
the  point  was  one  which  impressed  itself  on  me  as  outside 
the  peculiar  sphere  of  any  specialist  and  belonging  to  the 
general  theory  of  reality,  merely  illustrated  in  a  special 
fashion. 

Relativity  in  its  widest  sense  is  an  old  and  familiar 
idea.  It  sometimes  only  means  that  our  view  of  things 
in  the  world  varies  with  our  personal  circumstances.  The 
hills  look  as  if  on  fire.  But  if  I  change  my  position  I  see 
that  what  I  took  to  be  fire  was  really  an  appearance  due 
to  my  position  and  produced  by  the  light  of  the  sunset. 
A  book  seems  obscure  and  dull ;  with  fuller  knowledge  it 
becomes  both  lucid  and  engrossing.  A  neighbour  seems 
objectionable.  I  have  not  appreciated  his  character. 


INDIVIDUAL   RELATIVITY  35 

When  I  come  to  do  so  I  believe  in  him,  and  take  an  alto- 
gether different  view  of  his  nature  : 

"  Why,  what  but  faith,  do  we  abhor 
And  idolise  each  other  for — 
Faith  in  our  evil  or  our  good, 
Which  is  or  is  not  understood 
Aright  by  those  we  love  or  those 
We  hate,  thence  called  our  friends  or  foes  !  " 

There  is  another  sense,  quite  different  from  this,  in 
which  relativity  imports  that  our  direct  knowledge  is  not 
of  things  as  they  are  in  themselves,  but  only  as  they  appear 
in  relation  to  our  minds,  and  thus  phenomenally.  Kant 
and  Sir  William  Hamilton,  and  the  believers  in  the 
principle  of  Representative  Perception,  used  the  word  in 
this  latter  meaning.  But  relativity  may  have  yet  a  third 
meaning.  It  is  alleged  that,  however  much  we  exclude 
speculation  about  the  metaphysical  character  of  reality, 
and  however  earnestly  we  refuse  to  go  behind  actual 
experience,  that  experience  is  dependent  on  conditions, 
inasmuch  as  the  observer  employs,  and  is  compelled  by 
the  constitution  of  his  mind  to  employ,  standard  concep- 
tions which  exclude  from  him  all  but  certain  aspects 
of  what  appears.  These  conceptions  may  belong  to  the 
domain  of  physical  science,  or  of  biology,  or  of  morals,  or 
of  religion.  The  task  of  the  inquirer  is  in  each  case  to 
discover  what  they  are,  and  to  define  their  characters  and 
their  relations  to  each  other.  For  the  conceptions  mould 
the  experience  in  which  they  are  applied,  and  they  are 
apt  to  give  rise  to  the  mistaken  opinion  that  the  phases 
they  hypostatise  represent  separately  existing  and  inde- 
pendent realities.  Thus  a  living  organism  comes  to  be 
regarded  as  an  entity  of  a  kind  different  from  a  mechanism, 
and  a  mind  as  an  entity  or  kind  of  thing  subsisting  in 
isolation  from  both.  The  alternative  view  is  that  through 
our  conceptions  we  do  isolate,  but  that  we  isolate  only 
special  aspects  of  reality,  and  do  not  distinguish  indepen- 
dent realities  as  separately  subsisting.  If  the  object 
world  is  of  a  character  not  dissimilar  from  that  of  the 
mind,  then,  however  much  its  existence  be  not  dependent 
on  the  individual  mind  of  the  onlooker,  it  may  well  be 
that  the  process  of  distinction  of  aspects,  which  is  one  of 
making  abstraction  from  all  aspects  with  which  we  are 
not  immediately  concerned,  is  a  process  in  which  the  mind 


86  RELATIVITY  AND   WHAT   IT  MEANS 

finds  in  nature  something  analogous  to  its  own  character 
in  respect  of  its  generality.  Our  experience  may  really 
indicate  degrees  or  levels  that  are  only  intelligible  as  dis- 
tinguished in  the  mind,  although  the  mind  does  not  put 
them  there  but  finds  them  there.  Existence  and  its 
meaning  will  thus  be  inseparable,  in  the  fashion  of  which 
Kant  thought  in  opposition  to  Berkeley.  The  world  of 
nature  will  be  a  world  into  which  concepts  enter,  in  the 
sense  that  it  is  only  mediately,  by  interpretation  through 
them,  and  not  by  mere  passive  sense-awareness,  that  we 
reach  what  its  reality  signifies,  and  discover  the  laws  which 
obtain  in  it.  The  methods  of  science  in  this  way  bring 
the  observer  into  new  regions,  regions  in  which  the  notion 
no  longer  holds  that  nature  can  be  taken  as  closed  against 
mind  in  any  but  a  provisional  sense.  For  the  object- 
world  turns  out  to  be  an  entirety,  in  which  the  differ- 
ences between  primary  and  secondary  qualities,  between, 
for  example,  molecular  activity  and  the  colour  which  results 
from  it,  no  longer  appear  as  differences  between  actually 
independent  entities,  or  even  as  due  to  causes  and  effects 
belonging  to  separate  sections  of  the  actual.  They  will 
be  differences  which  result  from  distinctions  in  the  order 
of  both  knowledge  and  existence,  in  phases  to  be  looked 
upon  as  belonging  to  a  single  entirety,  and  it  will  follow 
that  whether  we  reach  these  phases  or  do  not  depends  on 
the  standpoints  from  which  we  find  ourselves  approaching 
nature.  Our  knowledge  is  in  this  sense  relative  ;  but  not 
only  our  knowledge.  The  experience  to  which  it  is 
directed  is  itself  relative,  in  that  its  reality  involves  the 
variety  in  level  which  the  totality  of  the  experience  pre- 
sents. The  distinction  between  appearance  and  reality 
becomes  one  of  degrees  towards  full  comprehension. 

What  is  before  us  is  there,  and  is  independent  of  the 
particular  onlookers  who  are  present  along  with  it.  It  is 
discoverable  for  us  only  by  means  of  observation  and 
experiment,  and  not  by  a  priori  reasoning.  The  principles 
which  have  governed  scientific  method  since  Bacon  laid 
its  foundations  apply  undisturbed.  The  thing  which  we 
have  to  avoid  is  apart  from  these  principles.  It  is  the  temp- 
tation, arising  from  carelessness  or  from  want  of  know- 
ledge, to  slip  inconsiderately  from  the  terms  of  one  order 
of  thought  which  is  appropriate  to  the  facts  which  are 
actual  into  the  terms  of  a  different  order  which  is  not  so 


INTERPRETATION  OF  RELATIVITY  37 

appropriate.  We  have  to  take  heed,  in  the  light  which 
the  principle  of  relativity  casts  on  the  problem  of  scientific 
inquiry,  lest  we  employ  our  general  conceptions  un- 
critically and  at  large,  and  so  fall  into  the  blunder 
of  confusing  our  categories.  If  we  do  so  we  shall  in 
the  end  inevitably  prove  to  have  been  false  to  the  only 
facts  before  us,  and  to  the  application  of  the  proper  con- 
ceptions which  they  called  for,  conceptions  falling  within 
the  order  in  knowledge  that  was  alone  appropriate.  Should 
we  Tail  to  exercise  the  care  over  this  that  is  needful  we 
shall  only  add  more  illustrations  of  distorted  apprehension 
and  of  failure  to  reach  the  real. 

It  is,  as  we  shall  see,  with  just  this  kind  of  significance 
that  reality  is  said  to-day,  in  philosophy  and  science 
alike,  to  depend  on  the  principle  of  relativity.  The  source 
of  the  relativity  may  sometimes  depend,  in  this  new 
meaning,  on  conditions  which  affect  observers  whose 
knowledge  is  governed  by  a  set  of  common  conditions,  so 
long  as  these  conditions  remain  for  them  the  same.  Rela- 
tivity may  be  due  to  such  a  set  of  conditions  and  even  be 
the  outcome  of  the  very  nature  of  the  mind  itself,  to 
such  an  extent  that  the  imagined  line  of  demarcation 
between  the  mental  and  the  non-mental  world  turns  out 
to  be  only  relatively  a  true  one.  It  is  relativity  of  this 
wide  nature,  further- reaching  in  its  scope  than  is  usually 
supposed,  that  I  propose  to  consider  in  its  various  aspects 
throughout  what  follows.  It  is  a  relativity  that  is  not 
subjective,  in  the  sense  that  things  are  only  to  each  of 
us  what  they  appear  to  be.  Man  individually  is  not,  as 
with  Protagoras,  the  measure  of  all  things.  On  the  other 
hand,  reality  appears  to  be  unintelligible  apart  from  its 
relation  to  knowledge.  But  then  individual  knowledge 
itself  may  well  turn  out  to  be  unintelligible  apart  from  a 
structure  which  is  foundational  in  the  knowledge  of  every 
individual  knower.  Kant  has  made  this  view  widely 
understood,  whether  or  not  he  was  right  in  his  presenta- 
tion of  it.  The  schematism  in  the  forms  of  space  and 
time  of  the  activity  of  mind  in  connection  with  his  cate- 
gories which  Kant  expounds,  is  worth  study  if  only  as  a 
means  of  approach  to  modern  physical  problems.  Kant 
did  not,  as  the  physicists  of  to-day  in  effect  do,  distinguish 
sharply  between  the  intuitional  and  the  conceptual  aspects 
of  our  experience  in  space  and  time.  A  purely  intuitional  or 


88  RELATIVITY  AND   WHAT   IT  MEANS 

sensuous  apprehension,  the  only  one  with  which  he  imagined 
that  he  had  to  concern  himself,  does  not  lend  itself  to 
such  a  question  as  whether  physical  space  is  Euclidean 
or  not.  The  distinction,  with  its  far-reaching  conse- 
quences, is  one,  as  we  shall  see,  that  arises  only  in  space 
and  time  into  which  concepts  due  to  reflection  enter,  and 
the  possibility  of  a  derivative  foundation  for  space  and 
time  was  not  one  which  Kant  had  before  his  mind. 

The  wider  meaning  of  relativity  I  have  now  indicated 
in  the  general  fashion  which  is  all  that  is  possible  at  this 
early  stage.  It  does  not  import  either  that  object  can  be 
reduced  to  subject  or  that  subject  depends  on  object.  It 
does  in  the  end  import  that  we  have  to  ask  whether  these 
are  not  themselves  conceptions  of  a  secondary  nature, 
arising  within  mind  or  knowledge  with  a  character  that 
is  foundational  to  both.  If  so,  the  principle  of  relativity 
may  turn  out  to  be  not  only  a  natural  but  an  essential 
principle,  if  the  universe  is  to  be  intelligible.  The  ques- 
tion of  how  knowledge  in  general  has  come  into  existence 
becomes  a  mistaken  one.  The  real  question  ought  to  be 
quite  different,  as  to  how  knowledge  is  conditioned  in  the 
individual  who  on  the  particular  occasion  knows,  and  as 
to  the  circumstances  and  history  which  have  brought  the 
conditioning  about.  For  the  first  form  of  the  question, 
which  seeks  to  ask  for  an  explanation  of  how  there  is  any 
knowledge,  in  reality  assumes  the  fact  of  knowledge  as  its 
presupposition,  the  very  fact  behind  which  it  sets  itself 
to  go.  The  question  in  the  second  form,  on  the  other 
hand,  leaves  it  possible  to  treat  knowledge  as  the  foun- 
dational fact,  and  to  confine  the  investigation  to  forms 
in  which  it  discloses  itself. 

The  distinction  between  these  two  questions  is  a  vital 
one.  It  is  a  distinction  that  has  been  much  neglected, 
and  the  neglect  to  take  account  of  it  has  given  rise,  not 
only  to  much  confusion  of  mind,  but  to  various  meta- 
physical systems  of  a  transitory  character,  founded  on 
more  than  dubious  assumptions.  The  effect  of  these 
assumptions  has  been  that  those  who  made  them  have 
gone  on  to  set  up  a  gap  between  the  mental  and  the  non- 
mental  which  it  is  difficult  to  recognise  as  final  in  experi- 
ence, either  ordinary  or  scientific.  The  obscurity  which 
surrounds  the  reality  of  this  gap  appears  to  be  forced  on 
our  attention  even  in  science,  as  some  of  its  most  recent 


THE   PRINCIPLE   IN   PHYSICS  39 

developments  show.  The  apparent  difficulties  appear  to 
be  due,  in  part  at  least,  to  failure  to  take  account  of  the 
principle  of  relativity  itself.  I  therefore  turn  to  the  con- 
sideration of  this  principle. 

I  propose  to  refer  in  the  first  place  to  the  fashion  in 
which  the  principle  in  its  modern  aspect  has  been  recently 
forced  on  our  attention  by  the  physicists.  The  most 
remarkable  illustration  of  this  is  the  teaching  of  Einstein. 
For,  if  he  be  right,  he  has  been  the  initiator  of  ideas  really 
more  revolutionary  than  those  of  Copernicus  or  of  Newton. 
Not  only  does  he  claim  to  have  deprived  space  and  time 
of  their  supposed  characters  as  self-subsistent  and  uniform 
frameworks  of  existence,  belonging  to  an  altogether  non- 
mental  world,  but  he  and  those  who  think  with  him  have 
given  a  new  meaning  to  the  most  general  of  the  laws  of 
nature.  An  English  mathematician,  Professor  White- 
head,  has,  as  I  will  point  out  a  little  later,  investigated  the 
question  in  a  different  way,  the  importance  of  which  is, 
I  think,  hardly  yet  understood. 

Einstein's  language  is  that  of  the  mathematician,  and 
mathematics  is  his  chief  instrument.  This  has  its  great 
advantages.  Mathematical  expressions  possess  an  exact- 
ness depending  on  abstraction  carried  within  definite 
limits  to  a  high  degree  of  perfection.  They  are  the 
outcome  of  a  consistent  purpose,  which  is  to  disregard  and 
eliminate  all  that  is  irrelevant  to  the  end  of  presenting 
relations  of  order  in  externality  in  the  most  precise  and 
general  form  practicable.  Because  they  deal  with  what 
can  be  visualised  in  space  and  can  symbolise  relations  of 
order  of  this  kind  to  the  exclusion  of  all  else,  they  can  be 
kept  more  free  from  ambiguity  and  from  metaphor  than 
the  expressions  of  metaphysics  can  be.  Mathematical 
language  may  thus,  like  poetry,  be  described  as  perfect 
speech,  but  it  is  perfect  in  quite  a  different  sense.  It 
deliberately  looks  away  from  quality,  especially  from 
that  with  which  poetical  imagery,  for  example,  is  con- 
cerned. It  ignores  all  aspects  of  the  universe  other  than 
those  which  can  be  brought  under  the  special  conceptions 
with  which  it  deals.  Now  in  such  conceptions  we  have  to 
do  with  entities  conceived  as  indistinguishable  from  each 
other  save  through  measurable  relations.  Apart  from 
these  relations  they  are  not,  in  any  pure  form  such  as  is 
required,  recognisable,  but,  on  the  other  hand,  the  rela- 


40  RELATIVITY   AND   WHAT   IT  MEANS 

tions  require  the  entities  as  their  basis.  The  entity  and 
its  relations  are  thus  inseparable.  Taken  by  themselves 
they  are  mere  abstractions.  But  taken  together  we  find 
in  them  the  characteristics  of  fundamental  arrangements 
in  order  which  we  recognise  and  express  as  the  roots  of  the 
most  general  of  all  physical  laws.  The  entities  and  their 
relations,  whether  we  are  thinking  of  them  as  point- 
events  with  their  intervals  or  in  any  other  form,  we  cannot 
immediately  perceive.  For  perception  starts  from  feeling 
of  contact  with  our  organism  and  is  in  itself  chaotic  and 
formless.  It  is  only  by  interpretation  that  we  recognise 
its  setting  in  an  order  of  universals  which  are  inseparable 
from  its  reality  for  us,  and  this  order,  and  the  distinctions 
in  it  which  give  rise  to  definiteness  and  precision,  are 
reached  by  interpretation  made  mediately  through  con- 
ceptions. The  aspect  of  reality  with  which  the  mathe- 
matician has  to  deal,  however  final  it  may  appear,  and 
however  independent  it  may  be  of  a  particular  observer, 
is  therefore  conceptual,  although  it  does  not  the  less  on 
that  account  stand  for  what  is  actual.  He  is  not  con- 
cerned with  the  question  whether  mind  makes  things  or 
things  make  mind.  He  is  the  less  inclined  to  trouble 
himself  about  this  question  because  he  has  not  before  him 
any  distinction  between  them  which  is  either  clear  or 
relevant  to  his  task.  And  his  great  advantage  is  that  he 
has  a  multitude  of  visual  symbols  which  he  can  not  only 
operate  but  observe  in  their  mutual  relations. 

It  is  easy  for  mathematics,  in  virtue  of  its  methods  of 
interpretation,  and  by  abstraction  from  what  is  irrelevant 
to  the  purpose  in  hand,  to  bring  what  are  thus  general 
forms  of  reality,  which  the  individual  mind  recognises  as 
confronting  it  independently  of  its  particular  personality, 
into  distinctness.  It  develops  their  implications  and  so 
reaches  new  knowledge.  When  the  work  is  at  the  highest 
degree  of  generality,  a  borderland  discloses  itself  between 
mathematics  on  the  one  hand  and  the  territory  of  episte- 
mology  and  logic  on  the  other.  To  this  borderland  those 
on  both  sides  have  access.  There  is  no  barbed  wire  fence 
which  prevents  temporary  crossings.  Into  the  purely 
mathematical  aspects  of  such  doctrine  as  that  of  Einstein, 
few  philosophers  are  rash  enough  to  attempt  to  enter. 
Mathematicians  talk  in  an  admirably  lucid  language  which 
is  exclusively  their  own.  But  still  it  does  not  describe 


INTERPRETATION  41 

all  the  ground  to  be  covered,  and  it  is  only  with  further 
territory  within  the  borderland  that  philosophy  is  con- 
cerned. From  this  territory  it  is  possible  to  see  something 
of  the  features  of  the  other  ground  around  it  in  more 
directions  than  one. 

As  I  shall  have  to  point  out  more  fully  later  on,  our 
knowledge  of  the  world  that  seems  to  confront  us  is  pro- 
foundly shaped  by  the  conditions  under  which  we  know. 
In  human  experience  the  mind  expresses  itself  only  under 
certain  organic  conditions.  Inasmuch  as  the  organism  is 
what  nature  has  made  it,  we  know  in  the  first  instance 
through  our  senses,  among  which  the  one  that  has  the 
widest  range  is  sight.  But  if  all  we  found  in  experience 
was  the  sensations  that  come  to  the  organism  through 
the  sense  of  sight  we  should  have  no  objective  world. 
It  is,  as  we  have  seen,  only  in  virtue  of  interpretation  that 
such  a  world  becomes  present  to  consciousness.  Mere 
isolated  impressions  could  not  give  it  to  us.  It  is  as 
understood,  and  by  the  aid  of  memory  in  which  are  con- 
nected the  past  and  the  present,  that  we  become  aware 
of  the  orderly  arrangement  of  the  coexistences  and  suc- 
cessions which  underlie  our  actual  world.  Whether  the 
relations  that  are  essential  to  this  awareness  exist  outside 
our  minds,  or  only  within  our  minds,  or  both,  the  result 
seems  the  same.  But  what  is  the  character  of  these  rela- 
tions ?  They  are  not  themselves  sensations,  they  are  the 
intelligible  setting  in  which  the  mind  by  interpretation 
finds  what  comes  to  it  through  sensation,  but  lies  beyond 
mere  sensation.  When  I  look  for  the  cause  of  some  event 
that  has  happened  it  is  because  I  envisage  it  as  implying 
a  relation  to  some  event  that  I  conceive  as  having  pre- 
ceded it.  When  I  say  that  two  and  two  make  four  I  am 
establishing,  or  at  least  recognising,  a  relation  that  is  no 
mere  particular  of  feeling,  but  is  of  general  application. 
I  am,  in  short,  always  seeking  to  discover  what  goes 
beyond  the  sense  of  the  moment,  and  is  therefore  not 
immediately  perceived,  but  known  by  the  introduction  of 
reflection  in  some  degree,  however  small.  To  this  factual 
region  of  reflection  the  general  principles  which  enter  into 
my  world  belong,  and,  if  they  are  found  to  be  both  reliable 
guides  in  the  progress  of  my  knowledge  and  wide  enough 
in  their  application,  I  call  them  laws  of  nature.  They  are 
really  very  general  relations  which  disclose  themselves  to 


42  RELATIVITY  AND  WHAT   IT  MEANS 

all  men  who  inquire  under  the  conditions  that  obtain  in 
common  for  them  as  in  my  own  case.  Extended  observa- 
tion through  experiment  and  the  detachment  of  attention 
from  what  is  irrelevant  enable  us  to  generalise  induc- 
tively, so  as  to  reach  principles  which  apply  to  varieties 
in  actual  experience.  Not  only  do  these  principles  give 
to  that  experience  a  fuller  meaning  than  it  possesses  apart 
from  their  underlying  implication  in  its  nature,  but  they 
enable  us  to  predict  and  to  extend  it.  They  are  not  the 
less,  because  of  their  accordance  with  experience,  creatures 
of  reflection.  They  have  no  significance  apart  from  their 
recognition,  and  they  belong  to  the  interpretation  of 
experience,  arising  only  in  mediate  knowledge  of  a  general 
kind,  different  altogether  from  the  isolated  sense  of 
impressions  made  on  the  extremities  of  the  nerves. 

All  our  knowledge  of  nature  is  of  this  sort,  but  a  great 
deal  of  it  is  concerned  with  relations  of  quantity,  which 
depend  on  things  being  experienced  as  apart  from  each 
other  in  space  or  in  time  or  in  both.  Indeed,  space  and 
time  appear  to  be  themselves  got  at  by  generalisation  from 
the  apartness  of  events.  It  is  not  through  differences  in 
quality  that  they  possess  their  main  importance.  This 
they  have  in  relation  to  differences  in  position  or  order, 
without  reference  to  the  colour  or  other  characteristic 
and  individual  qualities  of  the  things  themselves.  When 
we  compare  these  latter  characteristics  we  may  not 
primarily  be  concerned  with  position  or  order  at  all. 

This,  stated  briefly,  seems  to  be  how  we  come  to  the 
notion  of  our  world  as  displaying  quantitative  order,  and 
to  space  and  time  as  the  characteristic  forms  in  which 
that  order  is  displayed.  But  these  are  merely  general 
relations.  For  to  get  at  a  clear  conception  of  them  we 
have  to  leave  out  of  account  all  considerations  relating  to 
the  individual  peculiarities  of  the  objects  they  contain. 
We  may  even  have  to  make  abstraction  of  our  attention 
from  the  whole  of  the  objects  that  fill  them.  Our  know- 
ledge about  space  and  time  simply  as  such  is  therefore 
abstract  knowledge,  and  in  so  far  imperfect.  We  perceive 
immediately  and  directly  neither  empty  space  nor  empty 
time,  any  more  than  we  perceive  objects  otherwise  than 
within  them.  They  are  only  conceived,  not  perceived,  in 
their  abstract  purity.  They  are  relations  which  reflection 
discovers  and  disentangles.  But  having  disentangled 


SPACE   AND   TIME  43 

them,  people  have  been  in  use  to  take  them,  not  indeed 
as  forming  a  part  of  their  world  as  particular  objects 
existing  independently,  but  as  a  kind  of  actually  sub- 
sisting framework  in  which  objects  are  set,  and  so  as 
belonging  to  the  actual  hi  the  same  fashion  for  every  kind 
of  individual  observer,  however  he  may  observe  and 
without  reference  to  any  conditions.  In  this  respect  space 
and  time  are  usually  spoken  of  as  though  absolutely  real, 
and  as  being  there  just  as  they  seem  to  be.  Newton  took 
this  view.  A  generalisation  such  as  this  becomes  invested 
with  a  high  reputation  for  certainty.  The  world  often 
generalises  confidently  with  even  less  ground  for  convic- 
tion. It  took  a  very  long  time  before  extended  and 
accurate  observations  succeeded  in  getting  rid  of  the 
Ptolemaic  view  of  the  heavens  and  of  the  old-fashioned 
corpuscular  theory  of  light  and  heat.  We  must  draw 
inferences  and  so  generalise  to  a  cause  or  a  law  if  we  want 
to  get  a  rational  explanation  of  the  facts,  and,  if  our  earlier 
rational  explanation  will  not  fit  them,  we  then  look  for  a 
new  generalisation.  That  is  due  to  the  finite  and  relative 
character  of  our  knowledge,  and  it  is  also  the  explanation 
of  why  we  are  apt  to  stop  prematurely  in  the  task  of 
explanation,  and  to  get  ourselves  entangled  in  what  is  only 
conventionally  true,  instead  of  having  reflected  and  inter- 
preted on  a  basis  so  wide  and  so  uniform  that  it  is  found 
to  explain  all  the  facts,  and  to  give  what  we  can  call 
properly  a  law  of  nature. 

Our  current  notions  of  space  and  time  are  illustrations 
of  results  of  generalisations  which,  if  Einstein  is  right,  are, 
although  wide  in  their  basis,  yet  quite  inadequate.  So 
far  from  being  frameworks  in  which,  as  perceived  by  us, 
things  exist  in  the  same  way  under  all  sets  of  conditions, 
and  which  are  always  absolutely  uniform,  he  says  that  it 
is  due  to  the  position  of  the  observer  that  they  present 
themselves  with  the  shapes  and  measurements  we  attri- 
bute to  them  as  being  of  their  essence.  It  is  only  rela- 
tively that  the  current  ideas  of  the  relations  in  them  of 
objects  are  true,  or  that  they  themselves  exist  as  they  are. 
For  the  space  and  time  which  we  observe  may  derive 
their  forms  from  the  conditions  affecting  the  observers, 
and  so  may  turn  out  to  be,  not  absolute,  but  only  varying 
systems.  The  outcome  of  Einstein's  doctrine  is  a  new 
and  more  searching  set  of  generalisations  about  space 


44  RELATIVITY  AND   WHAT  IT  MEANS 

and  time,  and  the  objects  in  them.  The  necessity  of  a 
change  in  point  of  view  is  asserted  to  be  that  the  old 
theory  will  not  fit  the  facts,  as  fuller  observation  has 
ascertained  their  nature.  If  he  is  well  founded  in  what 
he  says,  we  have  now  to  accept  certain  consequences  of 
the  principle  that  we  can  only  describe  with  accuracy  the 
positions  of  objects  in  nature  if  we  bear  in  mind  that 
their  relations  in  space  and  time  are  relative  to  the  special 
co-ordinates  or  systems  of  reference  of  the  observer  and 
vary  accordingly.  Newton  thought  that  space  and  time 
presented  frameworks  of  reference  subsisting  indepen- 
dently of  the  observer,  and  that,  if  we  had  once  fashioned 
for  ourselves  adequately  a  set  of  co-ordinates  for  them 
which  were  unvarying,  this  might  be  relied  on  as  a  stan- 
dard for  universal  and  not  merely  relative  truth  in  measure- 
ment. Now  there  may  be  a  great  number  of  observers 
each  relying  practically  on  a  similar  frame  of  reference, 
and,  in  so  far  as  all  of  these  refer  to  it,  these  observers 
will  to  that  extent  have  a  general  and  not  merely  a  sub- 
jective or  individual  outlook.  Still,  their  collective  stan- 
dard is  merely  relative,  inasmuch  as  it  depends  on  the 
co-ordinates  which  the  whole  class  of  these  observers 
employ  in  common,  co-ordinates  which  may,  by  their 
nature,  be  only  relative.  The  task  of  the  mathematical 
physicist  is,  therefore,  to  dig  deeper  down  in  searching  for 
universally  true  foundations  for  measurement  and  quanti- 
tative knowledge  generally.  He  has  to  clear  his  mind, 
not  only  of  prejudices  in  favour  of  the  absolute  character 
of  space  and  time,  but  of  other  prejudices  on  his  way. 
We  talk  of  force  as  if  we  knew  what  we  were  speaking  of. 
If  we  were  concerned,  as  are  followers  of  Schopenhauer  or 
Bergson,  with  what  for  them  is  direct  or  intuitional  appre- 
hension of  will  power  or  of  creative  energy,  we  might 
attach  a  definite  meaning  to  the  word  force.  But,  in  the 
capacity  of  physicists,  concerned  only  with  the  observa- 
tion of  quantitative  change  and  of  alteration  in  position, 
we  cannot  do  this.  All  we  actually  observe  is  variation 
in  the  situations  of  things  relatively  to  each  other,  and 
even  the  phenomena  of  what  we  have  been  used  to  put 
down  to  the  account  of  some  force  acting  at  a  distance  can 
as  a  rule  equally  well  be  stated  exhaustively  in  terms  of 
mere  variation  of  situations  arising  from  the  relative 
positions  of  the  observer.  If  a  lady  drops  her  parasol  and 


ILLUSTRATIONS  45 

it  seems  to  her  to  be  attracted  by  gravitation  to  the 
muddy  pavement,  it  is  not  difficult,  if  we  make  an  effort 
to  free  ourselves  from  unconscious  assumptions,  to  repre- 
sent this  adequately  from  another  conceivable  point  of 
view.  For  an  observer  with  a  sufficiently  powerful  tele- 
scope, and  himself  at  such  a  distance  as  to  know  nothing 
of  any  gravitational  attraction  from  the  earth,  it  might 
appear  that  the  earth  and  the  lady  were  moving  upwards 
with  an  accelerating  or  increasing  velocity,  and  that  when 
the  lady's  parasol  slipped  out  of  her  hand  it  at  that 
moment  lost  its  accelerating  push,  and  relapsed  into  a 
rate  of  motion  upwards  that  was  uniform  and  without 
acceleration.  In  consequence  it  would  be  obvious  to  the 
distant  observer  that  the  accelerating  pavement  and  the 
mud  had  overtaken  it,  instead  of  the  parasol  having 
descended  to  them.  The  approach  in  position  would, 
for  such  a  distant  observer,  with  co-ordinates  of  reference 
other  than  those  of  the  lady  on  the  pavement,  be  one  of 
the  earth  relatively  to  the  parasol,  while  for  the  lady 
the  change  of  position  would  be,  according  to  her  mundane 
co-ordinates,  one  of  the  parasol  relatively  to  the  pave- 
ment. In  each  case  the  phenomenon  observed  would  be 
observed  as  it  actually  happened,  and  appear  as  it  did 
simply  because  of  the  special  position  of  the  observer. 
The  relations  described,  whether  spatial,  as  in  direction 
and  distance,  or  temporal,  as  concerned  with  time  in  the 
beginning  and  ending  of  the  journey  of  the  parasol,  would 
depend  on  the  standards  of  the  observer  for  their 
reality,  which  would  therefore  be  relative  only.  What 
Einstein  has  sought  to  do  is  to  clear  out  of  the  most 
fundamental  conceptions  of  physical  science  convention- 
alities and  prejudices  which  prevent  us  from  arriving  at 
a  view  which  will  explain  all  the  facts  and  not  only  certain 
of  them.  It  is  because  the  old  system  could  not  account 
for  what  was  observed  in  connection  with  such  facts  of 
observation  as  the  movement  of  the  perihelion  of  Mer- 
cury, the  ultimately  ascertained  deflection  of  the  rays  of 
certain  fixed  stars  when  passing  the  sun,  the  principle  which 
actually  governs  the  electro-dynamical  activity  of  electrons, 
and  the  apparently  constant  velocity  of  light,  that  the 
school  of  Einstein  found  it  essential  to  try  to  penetrate 
more  thoroughly,  in  order  to  discover  reliable  founda- 
tions for  the  basis  of  our  scientific  knowledge  of  nature. 


46  RELATIVITY  AND  WHAT   IT  MEANS 

One  of  the  difficulties  people  feel  when,  as  so  many 
now  do,  they  read  about  relativity,  is  especially  that  over 
time.  It  is  hard  to  grasp  that  time  not  less  than  space 
is,  taken  in  isolation,  a  mere  abstraction.  It  is  difficult 
to  realise  that  time  and  space  really  imply  and  depend 
on  each  other,  in  notion  as  well  as  in  fact.  The  idea  that 
there  is  an  absolute  framework  of  time  and  a  quite 
independent  absolute  framework  of  space  is  not  easy  to 
avoid.  For  we  have  been  schooled  to  it,  and  the  idea 
works  well  for  the  purposes  of  everyday  life  on  our  globe. 
But  if  both  space  and  time  are  stripped  of  what  is  un- 
essential, and  presented  in  their  bare  nakedness,  they 
look  different.  If  there  were  no  succession  in  time,  and 
everything  appeared  as  at  one  instant,  a  little  reflection 
shows  that  we  could  not  apprehend  the  positions  of  points 
in  space.  Their  reality  depends  for  us  on  their  separa- 
tion, which  itself  depends  on  transition,  and  this  on  suc- 
cession in  time.  On  the  other  hand,  if,  in  the  absence  of 
all  separation  in  space,  there  were  only  one  spatial  point 
in  which  existence  centred  for  us  as  time  elapsed,  it  is 
equally  clear  that  intervals  of  time  would  have  no  meaning. 
Duration  would  be  immeasurable,  for  it  is  by  spatialising, 
as  on  the  dial  of  a  watch,  that  we  measure  it.  Space  and 
time  are  really  abstractions  from  a  reality  which  includes 
both  in  mutual  implication. 

It  seems,  then,  that  the  new  system  which  we  are  con- 
sidering is  not  that  of  any  merely  psychological  or 
intuitional  space  and  time  directly  and  completely  given 
in  direct  sensation,  for  this  could  not  be  resolved  in  the 
way  the  facts  require,  but  only  one  of  interpreted  space 
and  time  in  which  our  perceptions  are  correlated.  The 
psychological  data  are  only  the  beginning.  We  construe 
these  into  an  objective  space-time  manifold,  not  merely 
for  the  purposes  of  science,  but  as  a  necessity  of  our  daily 
life.  Our  space  and  time  may  well  be  real,  but  reality 
has  now  a  relative  meaning.  Apart  from  construction 
there  could  be  no  world  before  us.  Our  visual  and  tactual 
impressions  we  have  invested  with  importance  by  inter- 
preting them  as  in  relations  which  are  conceptual  in 
character,  in  the  sense  of  implying  reflection  and  not 
mere  feeling.  It  is  not  as  frameworks  subsisting  as  self- 
contained  phenomena  independently  of  the  objects  in 
them,  such  as  are  the  independent  space  and  time  Newton 


THE   WORK  OF  REFLECTION  47 

thought  of,  but  as  what  gets  meaning  only  in  our  thought 
about  them,  that  we  really  discover  space  and  time  in  our 
actual  experience.  Physics  does  not  deal  with  bare  sen- 
sations, but  mainly  with  the  coincidences  of  events,  coinci- 
dences which  are  not  immediately  presented  in  experience. 
That  it  has  so  often  to  describe  the  nature  of  such  coinci- 
dences by  means  of  differential  equations,  dealing  with 
notional  aspects  of  reality,  shows  this  to  be  so.  Its 
magnitudes  and  laws  are  more  often  than  not  altogether 
non-sensory.  This  does  not,  however,  signify  that  they  are 
not  real.  The  conception  of  an  electron  may  or  may  not 
be  a  final  one,  but  it  indicates  what  is  recognised  as  a  real 
connection  or  complex  of  actual  objective  .factors.  The 
picture  of  the  world,  as  recent  physicists  present  it,  may 
or  may  not  be  a  final  one,  but,  so  far  as  it  goes,  it  accounts 
for  the  facts  better  than  does  that  framed  by  an  untrained 
mind.  It  is  abstract,  of  course,  in  the  sense  that  there 
is  much  in  our  rich  and  varied  world  which  it  leaves  out  of 
account,  but  it  gives  us  a  system  of  symbols  by  means  of 
which  we  can  interpret,  predict,  and  indirectly  extend 
our  experience.  There  is  therefore  no  reason  why  we 
should  not  treat  the  scientific  objects,  which  the  physicist 
discovers  by  interpretation,  as  being  at  least  as  real  as 
the  bare  and  unstable  intuitional  elements  so  called,  from 
which  our  experience  is  popularly  believed  to  start.  If  a 
system  of  judgments  such  as  that  of  the  physicist  gives  us 
a  theory  which  is  the  only  one  that  covers  and  explains 
the  facts,  and  enables  us  to  pass  beyond  what  is  immediate, 
and  to  forecast  the  future  accurately,  we  have  evidence 
that  entitles  us  to  treat  it  as  presumably  true  of  reality. 
Before  closing  this  chapter  it  may  be  convenient  to  refer 
to  the  import  of  some  words  used  which  must  be  used 
again.  It  has  been  pointed  out  that  the  actual  facts 
we  know  are  always  individual  or  singular,  and  yet  imply 
a  general  aspect  as  well  as  one  of  particularity.  The  cow 
that  I  am  looking  at  from  the  window  where  I  am  writing, 
I  know  to  be  what  it  is  in  virtue  of  its  general  character 
as  belonging  to  a  class  of  animal.  I  also  know  it  as  this 
particular  cow,  here  and  now.  But  although  I  separate 
them  in  reflection  I  have  no  knowledge  of  these  aspects 
as  self-subsistent  entities  in  my  perception  of  the  indi- 
vidual animal.  Jersey  cow  is  a  general  description, 
depending  for  its  application  on  a  definition.  But  I  know 


48  RELATIVITY  AND   WHAT   IT  MEANS 

nothing  of  a  Jersey  cow  in  the  abstract.  What  I  do  know 
is  that  I  can  recognise  a  particular  animal  as  belonging 
to  that  class.  Nor  have  I  any  experience  of  a  cow  that 
belongs  to  no  class,  for  at  the  least  I  recognise  the  animal 
as  a  cow. 

Of  what  is  general  or  universal  per  se  I  have  therefore 
no  experience.  Nor  have  I  any  the  more  experience  of 
what  is  purely  particular.  When  I  look  at  the  cow  or 
point  to  it  I  say  that  it  is  this  cow  here  and  now  before 
me.  But  "  this,"  "  here,"  and  "  now  "  become  "  that," 
"  there,"  and  "  then  "  when  I  turn  round.  They,  too,  are 
universals.  The  barest  sensation  has  universals  in  it. 
Had  it  not  I  could  not  distinguish  and  so  be  conscious  of  it. 

Everything  therefore  turns  on  the  aspect  on  which  I 
concentrate  my  attention.  The  general  and  the  par- 
ticular are  ideals  in  my  knowledge  without  self-subsistence 
apart  from  my  reflection,  but  one  or  the  other  may  be  what 
is  important  to  attend  to.  The  particular  factor  is  never 
absent,  but  I  may  divert  reflection  from  it  if  it  is  unim- 
portant for  my  purpose.  Take  an  algebraic  symbol,  say  x. 
It  is  a  variable.  It  symbolises  not  any  arithmetical 
number  as  a  singular,  but  all  or  any  of  such  numbers  in 
so  far  as  they  belong  to  a  class  in  virtue  of  certain  pro- 
perties. Still,  I  think  of  it  as  an  a?,  a  mark  made  with 
ink  on  a  piece  of  paper.  This  helps  me  much.  The 
mark  serves  as  the  substitute  for  a  great  number  of  pro- 
cesses of  thought  that  are  implicit  but  irrelevant  to  my 
immediate  purpose,  which  is  to  extend  my  knowledge 
about  the  properties  of  the  class  to  which  x  belongs.  I 
gain  fresh  knowledge  by  doing  this.  If  x  —  y,  then 
®*  —  yl  =  0.  That  is  a  very  simple  illustration  of  how,  in 
mathematics,  progress  is  made  by  distraction  of  attention, 
resulting  not  only  in  economy  of  thought,  but  in  its 
extension  to  new  properties  of  classes  which  are  true 
whatever  the  particular  numbers  that  fall  within  the 
classes.  The  symbol  applies  to  all  or  any  of  the  numbers 
that  belong  to  the  class.  It  is  in  itself  a  singular,  but 
it  is  symbolic  of  a  universal,  and  can  be  treated  as  taking 
the  place  of  that  universal  in  a  multitude  of  operations 
visualised  on  paper  or  in  imagination  as  there  for  sight. 
What  is  dominant  is  the  general  aspect  that  is  separated 
out  by  abstraction  as  important  for  the  purpose  in  hand. 

The  same  thing  is  true  when  I  am  dealing  with  what 


t_     1  —.. 


GENERAL  AND   PARTICULAR  49 


belongs  to  ethical  or  artistic  knowledge.  If  I  say  of 
what  I  am  looking  at  that  it  is  good  or  beautiful,  I  am 
recognising  in  it  a  value.  Now,  as  we  shall  find,  certain 
values  are  foundational  in  knowledge  in  the  same  sense 
that  knowledge  generally  is  foundational.  They  cannot 
be  resolved  into  particular  sensations  of  pleasure.  For 
these  sensations  are  only  recognised  as  such  when  some- 
how classified  as  giving  pleasure  or  the  reverse.  In  such 
recognition  value  of  some  kind  is  attributed  to  them. 
The  value  may  be  of  a  high  order  or  of  a  low.  But  it  is 
a  value,  and  as  such  it  imports  what  is  general,  although 
here,  too,  we  never  can  get  away  in  our  experience  from 
a  factor  that  points  to  what  is  particular  and  fleeting. 
We  can  see  this  if  we  try  to  picture  to  ourselves  what 
"  valuable  "  means.  It  is  always  something  valuable,  of 
which  we  make  an  image  when  we  reflect  on  it.  Even 
the  goodness  of  God  is  of  this  nature.  The  language  of 
the  Scripture  and  of  poetry  illustrates  the  fact. 

All  this  is  the  outcome  of  the  character  of  knowledge. 
It  is  in  its  essence  individual.  The  difference  between 
what  we  call  general  knowledge  and  knowledge  in  detail 
is  one  of  degree.  The  degree  lies  in  the  emphasis  which 
we  lay  on  the  aspect  on  which  we  are  concentrating,  and 
this  turns  on  the  purpose  in  hand.  It  is  the  freedom  that 
is  characteristic  of  thought  which  enables  it  to  lay  stress 
now  on  one  aspect  and  now  on  another.  But  thought 
always  starts  from  what  is  individual,  and  from  this  it 
never  gets  away. 

As  it  is  with  knowing,  so  it  is  with  the  known.  They 
are  correlatives  and  have  the  same  character.  It  is  only 
by  abstraction  that  we  distinguish  in  them  the  general 
from  the  particular,  and  suggest  to  ourselves  that  these 
have  existence  independently  of  each  other.  That  was 
what  Aristotle  meant  when  he  said  that  there  was  nothing 
in  the  intellect  that  had  not  been  first  in  the  senses.  He 
might  equally  well  have  put  the  principle  the  other  way 
round.  But  the  power  of  distinguishing  by  making 
abstraction  may  be  very  important.  The  method  of  the 
mathematician  shows  this.  The  method  of  the  artist 
shows  it  not  less.  It  is  common  to  hear  people  say  that 
art  is  concerned  with  feeling.  This  is  quite  true.  Colour 
and  shape  are  its  material.  But  these  are  important  only 
in  so  far  as  they  are  made  symbolic  of  value,  and  value, 


50  RELATIVITY   AND   WHAT   IT   MEANS 

as  we  have  just  seen,  is  as  much  of  the  character  of  the 
universal  as  are  the  abstract  conceptions  of  the  mathe- 
matician. Values  vary  in  quality,  and  it  is  the  business 
of  the  poet  and  the  artist,  and  of  the  critic  in  literature 
and  art,  to  know  this,  and  to  be  able  to  discriminate 
between  values  and  to  place  them  in  their  order.  Reflec- 
tion is  always  present,  explicitly  or  implicitly.  It  makes 
us  aware  that  truth  and  beauty  and  goodness  have  final 
and  foundational  value,  and  that  beyond  them  we  cannot 
pass,  or  express  them  in  terms  beyond  their  own.  There 
are  other  values,  but  for  the  most  part  they  are  derivative 
and  merely  relative,  and  they  are  sometimes  false  in 
contrast  with  the  value  that  is  final.  It  should  be  added 
that  values  are  expressed,  not  as  a  rule  as  abstract  principles, 
but  as  ends.  They  have  not  the  less  on  that  account  the 
moment  of  the  universal  as  essential  in  them.  That  is 
because  they  belong  to  knowledge  in  the  widest  sense  of 
the  word. 


CHAPTER    IV 

RELATIVITY    IN   AN    ENGLISH   FORM 

THE  year  1919  witnessed  a  remarkable  change  in  the 
attitude  of  British  physicists  towards  the  old  Victorian 
ideas  of  space  and  time.  Four  years  previously  Einstein 
had  developed  his  principle  of  relativity,  and  had  given 
it  in  full  form  to  the  mathematical  public.  His  view  was 
revolutionary.  It  will  be  necessary  to  refer  to  it  later 
on,  and  for  the  present  it  is  enough  to  say  that  if  true  it 
implies  the  upsetting  of  the  conventional  ideas  about  the 
meaning  of  measurement.  Till  then  space  and  time  had 
generally  been  accepted  as  what  Newton  believed  them 
to  be.  They  were  regarded  as  resembling  independent 
frameworks,  everywhere  uniform  and  unchangeable,  in 
which  events  took  place.  They  were  looked  on  as  abso- 
lutely objective,  and  as  wholly  independent  of  the  con- 
ditions under  which  objects  in  them  were  observed.  Few 
people  had  even  suggested  that  the  measurements  made 
in  them  could  in  any  way  be  affected  by  these  conditions. 
But  Einstein  had  insisted  on  the  relativity  of  the  units 
measured  to  the  position  and  standards  of  reference  of 
the  observer,  and,  as  a  consequence,  that  the  geometry 
required  to  explain  the  universe  would  be  found  not  to  be 
restricted  to  that  of  Euclid,  but  to  extend  to  a  variety  of 
alternative  systems,  varying  with  circumstances  of  which 
full  account  must  be  taken.  There  was  no  such  thing 
for  him  as  a  position  of  absolute  rest  from  which  to  calcu- 
late ;  for  rest  was  in  itself  only  a  relative  term.  A  man 
in  an  express  train  might  seem  to  another  standing  on 
the  embankment  to  be  in  rapid  motion,  but,  so  far  as  his 
system  of  estimating  form  was  concerned,  there  was  no 
real  reason  why  the  former  should  not  just  as  much  con- 
sider himself  to  be  at  rest,  while  the  railway  line,  on 
which  he  looked  down  from  the  carriage  window,  flew  from 

51 


52  RELATIVITY  IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

under  the  wheels  and  carried  the  other  man  along  with 
it.  Such  a  suggestion  offends  what  we  call,  with  practical 
justification,  common  sense,  but  the  discrepancy  arises 
out  of  general  habits  of  thought  and  expression,  adopted 
to  render  possible  conformity  with  the  requirements  of 
social  intercourse,  and  these  are  not  final  for  analysis. 
The  reason  for  questioning  such  thoughts  and  expressions 
from  a  wider  standpoint  appears  less  startlingly  extrava- 
gant if  a  different  illustration  is  taken.  An  observer  of  the 
heavens  standing  on  our  earth  treats  himself  as  observing 
the  sun  from  a  stationary  position  on  the  earth,  and 
as  being  therefore  at  rest.  As  a  matter  of  fact  we  know 
that  the  earth  on  which  he  stands  is  moving  round  the  sun 
with  gigantic  velocity,  and  must  appear  so  to  an  observer 
on  the  sun.  The  points  of  view  of  the  two  observers  will 
therefore  be  so  different,  and  in  such  constant  change, 
that  it  is  easily  demonstrable  they  must  be  characterised 
by  great  differences  in  the  results  of  observation. 

Applying  the  same  principle  to  the  interpretation  of  the 
phenomena  of  gravitation  and  using  a  powerful  calculus, 
Einstein  had  succeeded  in  making  a  precise  estimate  of 
what  ought  to  appear  to  be  the  deflection  of  the  'rays 
coming  from  certain  distant  fixed  stars,  influenced  by  the 
gravitational  attraction  of  the  sun  on  the  passing  rays. 
The  idea  of  such  a  deflection  was  familiar  and  its  lines 
had  been  calculated  by  others  on  the  footing  that  space 
and  the  paths  of  light  in  it  were  under  all  conditions  of  the 
same  character.  The  actual  deflection  could  only  be 
observed  during  an  eclipse,  and  on  the  29th  of  May  1919 
such  an  eclipse  was  to  take  place.  Einstein  predicted 
that,  as  the  result  of  relativity,  the  actual  deflection  would, 
if  observed,  prove  to  be  by  a  definite  amount  greater  than 
it  could  be  if  the  Newtonian  theory  of  absolute  space  were 
true.  The  English  Astronomer  Royal  took  up  this 
challenge  in  1917,  when,  the  war  notwithstanding,  the 
details  of  Einstein's  calculations  had  reached  this  country. 
In  1919  two  English  expeditions  were  sent  out  to  West 
Africa  and  Brazil  respectively.  Successful  observations 
were  made.  In  November  the  Astronomer  Royal  an- 
nounced the  results  to  the  Royal  Society.  Einstein's 
calculation  had  proved  to  be  substantially  the  true  one, 
and  something  like  a  revolution  in  a  great  department  of 
scientific  thought  was  the  result. 


REVOLUTIONARY  CONTROVERSIES  53 

I  shall  refer  later  to  some  of  the  important  consequences 
of  the  new  view  for  philosophy.  For  the  moment  I  am 
concerned  with  its  bearing  on  the  old  Victorian  idea  of 
nature  which  had  been  inherited,  so  far  at  least  as  space 
and  time  were  concerned,  from  Newton.  As  to  that  idea 
there  is  preponderating  agreement  that  it  is  now  unten- 
able, but  its  rejection  is  already  giving  rise  to  much 
controversy  as  to  what  should  take  its  place.  One  school 
of  mathematical  physicists  seems  to  tend  towards  men- 
talism  of  some  kind  in  its  treatment  of  space  and  time.  A 
different  school  tends  to  regard  what  we  call  relativity  as 
an  objective  phenomenon,  belonging  to  nature  and  capable 
of  being  readily  recognised  as  belonging  to  it  if  we  will 
only  be  in  earnest  in  rejecting  the  bifurcation  doctrine  of 
the  older  physicists.  This  rejection  must  of  course  carry 
with  it  the  denial  of  any  framework  of  space,  time,  points, 
instants,  and  other  relations  within  that  framework,  if 
taken  to  be  existing  as  absolutely  self-contained  in  un- 
varying form  and  independently  of  secondary  qualities. 

It  is  safe  to  predict  that  there  will  be  hereafter  much 
discussion  of  the  question  thus  raised.  Already  the  mathe- 
maticians are  over  the  border-line,  and  are  at  work  in 
what  used  to  be  considered  the  domain  of  the  meta- 
physician. Perhaps  it  will  turn  out  that  the  title  deed 
of  the  latter  is  not  wholly  inoperative,  but  he  seems,  at 
present  at  least,  disposed  to  look  on  his  brother  the 
mathematician,  not  as  a  trespasser,  but  rather  as  a  long- 
expected  and  welcome  guest. 

The  problem  over  which  the  various  schools  of  mathe- 
matical physicists  tend  to  dispute  seems  to  emerge  as 
the  result  of  certain  assumptions.  If  our  minds  are  self- 
contained  things,  confronted  by  another  self-contained 
thing  called  nature,  it  is  difficult  to  account,  either  for  our 
knowledge  of  relative  space  and  time,  or  for  any  other 
sort  of  knowledge.  For  in  that  view,  knowledge  will 
consist  only  in  our  particular  impressions  or  our  general 
conceptions,  regarded  as  belonging  to  a  thing  we  call  the 
mind,  as  properties  or  instruments.  The  question  will 
then  arise,  impressions  or  conceptions  of  what  ?  More- 
over, if  the  reality  we  know  consists  in  something  different 
from  and  independent  of  the  way  in  which  the  mind 
conceives  it,  the  further  question  arises  as  to  what  this 
something  can  be  or  can  mean.  New  Realism,  as  will  be 


54  RELATIVITY   IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

seen  later  on,  has  appreciated  the  difficulty,  and  has 
treated  the  non- mental  world  of  nature  as  including, 
not  only  particulars,  but  universals,  which  we  seem  to 
find  there  and  so  become  acquainted  with.  But  another 
school  has  pointed  out  difficulties  in  the  way  of  this  answer, 
which  arise  from  the  assumption,  if  it  is  still  maintained, 
that  the  mind  is  a  thing.  The  latter  school  has  held  to 
it,  in  terms  which  have  varied  through  two  thousand  years 
but  have  embodied  the  same  principle,  that  it  is  a  fallacy 
to  treat  mind  as  a  thing.  For  what  it  is  for  us  appears 
rather  to  be  a  form  falling  within  knowledge  itself,  and  if 
so  it  is  within  the  ultimate  fact  of  knowledge  alone  that 
the  nature  and  origin  of  what  we  call  our  minds,  with  the 
particulars  and  universals  alike  that  belong  to  their  nature, 
must  be  sought.  In  that  case  impressions  and  concep- 
tions can  be  separated  only  by  abstractions  made  within 
knowledge.  The  individual  forms  which  arise  for  it,  alike 
as  expressed  in  the  character  of  a  world  external  to  mind, 
or  of  a  mind  as  conditioned  by  its  self-presentation  as  an 
individual  entity  confronting  that  world,  must  them- 
selves seek  their  explanation  within  knowledge  so  inter- 
preted that  behind  it  there  is  no  sense  in  trying  to  get. 
The  relativity  of  the  physicist  becomes  in  this  way  only 
a  special  case  of  relativity  of  a  wider  order.  It  ceases 
to  be  a  question  which  concerns  the  man  of  science  specially 
how  mind  is  related  to  nature,  and  how  the  contributions 
of  each  to  the  object  in  our  knowledge  are  to  be  apportioned. 
The  physicist,  indeed,  cannot  enter  on  the  discussion  of 
this  topic  without  becoming  a  metaphysician.  What 
he  has  to  do  is  to  search  out  and  be  conscious  of  tacit 
metaphysical  assumptions. 

But  it  may  well  be  that  he  can,  without  going  a  long 
way  into  philosophy,  and  even  if  he  abjures  metaphysics 
as  highly  dubious,  come  to  a  clear  understanding  with 
himself  as  to  the  true  character  of  his  method  and  its 
results.  This  is  what  the  older  physicists  failed  to  do, 
and  the  assumptions  they  unconsciously  made  in  conse- 
quence landed  them  in  dogmatism.  I  shall  presently 
illustrate  the  thoroughness  with  which  this  dogmatism 
has  been  brought  to  light  by  a  distinguished  British 
physicist  of  to-day,  who  seems  to  me  to  have  delivered 
the  question  of  physical  relativity  from  a  good  many  of 
the  difficulties  with  which  it  has  been  surrounded.  But 


THE  TEACHING  OF  EINSTEIN  55 

to  this  illustration  I  shall  not  be  in  a  position  to  proceed 
until  I  have  said  something  more  about  Einstein  himself. 
I  ought  to  add  here  that  I  am  fully  conscious  that  the 
present  chapter  may  not  be  found  by  the  general  reader 
to  be  an  easy  one.  It  comes  in  at  this  early  stage  because 
the  explanation  of  the  general  principle  renders  it  almost 
essential  that  it  should  do  so.  But  the  reader  may  find 
the  topic  less  forbidding  if  he  turns  first  to  the  next 
chapter,  which  seeks  to  explain,  so  far  as  is  necessary  for 
philosophical  purposes,  the  way  in  which  the  doctrine  of 
relativity  in  measurement  has  been  developed  by  Einstein 
and  his  school.  At  present  I  am  concerned  to  show  how 
our  knowledge  of  nature,  taken  as  given  by  science  itself 
without  twist  or  bias  due  to  a  priori  assumptions,  points 
us  in  the  direction  of  the  broad  principle  of  relativity. 
The  advantage  of  dealing  first  of  all  from  a  general  point 
of  view  with  the  principle  as  rendered  by  Einstein  is  that 
it  enables  the  student  to  see  the  limits  within  which  his 
work,  great  as  it  is,  has  been  confined.  The  object  of 
what  immediately  follows  is  to  get  at  the  explanation, 
not  only  of  the  shape  given  by  him  to  the  principle,  but 
of  the  mode  of  its  introduction  into  the  sciences  of  physical 
nature.  Before  this  can  be  done  we  must  have  in  our 
minds  at  least  the  general  character  of  his  doctrine.  In 
the  first  place  let  us  see  what  for  Einstein  himself  are  its 
broad  features,  reserving  the  details  for  a  subsequent 
stage. 

Stated  generally  the  teaching  of  Einstein  is  that  absolute 
rest  and  motion  are  meaningless  for  physical  science,  and 
that  motion  can  signify  only  the  changing  positions  of  bodies 
relatively  to  each  other.  This  is  the  sole  sort  of  physical 
change  of  which  we  have  experience,  and  the  idea  of  an 
absolute  motion  is  a  metaphysical  invention  of  the  school 
of  classical  mechanics  which  is  associated  with  the  great 
name  of  Newton.  The  latter,  as  already  observed,  believed 
in  space  and  time  as  in  themselves  independent  entities, 
and  as  unaltering  frameworks  within  which  each  pheno- 
menon of  nature  had  its  special  position.  This  is  the  view 
which  Einstein  has  attacked.  The  strength  of  his  position 
lies  not  only  in  the  consistency  of  his  reasoning,  but  in  the 
circumstance  that  he  is  able  to  do  what  the  older  school 
could  not,  to  give  a  clear  account  of  the  reasons  for 
certain  things  in  nature  which  are  apparently  inexplicable 


56  RELATIVITY  IN   AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

otherwise.  The  basis  of  his  explanation  is  that  all  measure- 
ment of  spatial  distances  is  really  performed,  not  by 
reference  to  any  absolute  spatial  standard,  such  as  an 
imagined  aether  might  give,  for  none  such  can  be  shown 
to  exist,  but  by  comparing  the  relative  positions  of  bodies 
as  observed.  It  follows  that,  if  the  comparison  is 
intended  to  result  in  a  reliable  measurement,  the  phenomena 
compared  must  be  interpreted  with  reference  to  the 
relative  situation  and  other  conditions  affecting  the 
observer  and  the  co-ordinates  employed  by  him  in 
measuring.  As  space  has  no  self-  contained  nature,  it  cannot 
have  attributed  to  it  any  necessary  conformity  with 
Euclidean  principles,  or  indeed  with  those  of  any  other 
particular  geometry.  Such  principles  cannot  govern  the 
constitution  of  its  varying  appearances  under  differing  con- 
ditions of  observation,  for  they  may  not  apply  to  the  facts. 

Applying  this  principle  Einstein  was  able  to  demonstrate 
without  difficulty  why  the  velocity  of  light  must  always 
appear  to  be  the  same,  whether  measured  from  a  body 
approaching  its  source  with  a  great  velocity  or  from  one 
at  rest.  In  the  case  of  two  situations  for  observation, 
one  of  which  was  in  uniform  rectilinear  movement  rela- 
tively to  the  other,  it  was  an  established  fact  that  the 
velocity  of  light  coming  towards  the  observer  was  in 
each  case  found  constant,  at  186,330  miles  a  second. 
This  well-known  circumstance  was  shown  by  Einstein  to 
have  an  adequate  explanation  which  did  not  require 
any  unlikely  hypothesis,  such  as  some  conjectural  pro- 
perty of  the  aether  in  contracting  the  measuring  standards 
used  by  the  person  passing  through  it  when  moving 
towards  that  source.  It  was  completely  intelligible  as 
soon  as  it  was  seen  that  when  making  his  measurements 
his  standard  of  reference  depended  on  his  situation,  and 
that  he  was  consequently  interpreting  units  which  pos- 
sessed a  meaning  different  from  that  of  the  units  measured 
by  another  observer  relatively  at  rest  to  him. 

The  impressive  conclusions  of  the  Einstein  doctrine  do 
not  stop  here.  Classical  mechanics  regarded  the  inertial 
mass  of  a  body  as  an  absolute  and  invariable  character- 
istic quantity.  But  according  to  the  deductions  from 
his  principle  of  the  relativity  of  rest  and  motion  inertia 
of  matter  signifies  no  more  than  energy  stored  up  or 
held  back  in  it.  As  the  outcome  of  this  everything 


INERTIA  AND   GRAVITATION  57 

that  we  know  of  the  inertia  of  energy  holds  without 
exception  for  the  inertia  of  matter.  Now  the  general 
principle  of  relativity  of  all  motion  had  led  Einstein 
to  yet  another  sweeping  conclusion.  It  is  well  known 
that  bodies  which  move  under  the  sole  influence  of 
what  we  call  gravitation  so  move  without  reference  to 
the  nature  of  the  body.  For  instance,  a  piece  of  lead 
and  a  piece  of  cork  fall  (if  in  vacuo  and  so  undisturbed  by 
currents  of  air)  at  the  same  rate.  The  acceleration  is 
independent  of  the  difference  in  material.  This  led 
Einstein  to  infer  that  gravitational  mass  is  in  reality  in- 
distinguishable from  inertial  mass.  The  same  quality 
will  therefore  manifest  itself  to  the  observer  as  weight 
or  as  inertial  energy,  according  to  his  circumstances  in 
observing.  This  leads  to  the  definition  of  a  new  principle, 
that  any  change  which  an  observer  perceives  in  the  motion 
of  a  body  as  due  to  gravitation  would  be  perceived  in 
exactly  the  same  way  if  there  were  no  gravitation,  pro- 
vided the  system  from  which  the  observation  takes  place 
be  moving  with  an  acceleration  suitable  to  the  supposed 
gravitation  as  it  would  appear  from  his  point  of  observation. 
Of  force  physicists  know  nothing.  What  they  experi- 
ence is  only  change  in  relative  position.  If,  therefore,  it 
is  once  established  that  gravitational  and  inertial  energy 
are  the  same  thing  regarded  from  different  standpoints  ; 
that  the  inertia  of  matter  is  only  the  inertia  of  latent 
energy  ;  and  that  the  unit  of  measurement  for  both  space 
and  time  varies,  according  to  the  conditions  of  the  observer, 
in  the  interpretation  that  must  be  given  to  it,  many 
consequences  ensue.  Some  of  these  are  slight.  Newtonian 
physics  remains  approximately  true  for  the  small  calcu- 
lations of  distance  which  are  all  that  we  require  for  every- 
day purposes  on  the  earth.  But  when  we  turn  to  our 
relations  to  the  heavenly  bodies,  the  case  may  be  enor- 
mously different.  And  even  for  us  on  the  earth  there  may 
be  tremendous  consequences.  These  may  not  develop 
practically  for  a  long  time,  but  we  cannot  be  sure  whether 
the  new  scientific  outlook  may  not  suddenly  bring  about 
some  unexpected  and  practical  transformation.  The 
business  world  is  just  beginning  to  ask  questions  about 
this.  I  translate  the  following  passage  from  a  recent 
article  by  a  shrewdly- minded  Berlin  engineer.  The  point 
he  raises  is  now  a  familiar  one.  There  is  nothing  new 


58  RELATIVITY   IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

in   it,    but    it    suggests    questionings   which  may   affect 
practice. 

"  According  to  the  new  light  which  science  is  throwing 
on  the  constitution  of  matter,  we  may  be  sure  that  the 
gigantic  store  of  energy  revealed  can  be  looked  for  only 
in  atomic  structure.  Even  existing  knowledge  about  its 
dissolution  in  connection  with  radio-active  substances  has 
indicated  to  us  similarly  startling  monstrosities.  A 
gramme  of  radium,  in  its  complete  self- con  version  into 
lead,  exhibits  the  tenth  part  of  the  very  amount  of  energy 
which,  according  to  the  theory  of  relativity,  must  be 
developed  by  its  dissolution  into  nothing,  and  in  the 
course  of  such  a  conversion  it  appears  to  lose  10  per  cent 
of  its  mass.  The  phenomena  of  radio- activity  thus  yield 
a  strong  confirmation  of  the  result  of  the  theory  of  rela- 
tivity. While  we  are  standing  to-day  powerless  when 
confronted  with  the  atomic  dissolution  of  the  radio-active 
substances,  just  as  did  primaeval  man  before  a  forest 
conflagration,  the  theory  of  relativity  tells  us  that  it  must 
be  possible  to  break  up  the  atoms  of  any  mass  we  encounter, 
and  to  win  from  it  the  gigantic  amounts  of  energy  that  are 
there  latent,  In  this  fashion  the  theory,  which  has  come 
into  the  world  in  a  form  so  entirely  abstract  and  mathe- 
matical, presses  on  us  guidance  for  the  practical  technical 
work  of  future  centuries.  It  places  the  task  of  obtaining 
new  sources  of  energy  so  sharply  before  us,  so  clearly  and 
so  precisely  for  calculation,  that  it  will  be  surprising  if  in 
practice  we  do  not  pretty  quickly  attain  to  the  accom- 
plishment of  this  task." 

This  writer  estimates  that  there  is  as  much  heat  energy 
latent  in  a  thimbleful  of  ordinary  matter  as  there  is  to  be 
got  by  ordinary  processes  out  of  3,000  tons  of  coal.  For 
the  present  we  can,  by  very  wasteful  methods,  convert  a 
mere  percentage  of  the  latent  energy  of  the  3,000  tons  of 
coal  into  kinetic  heat  energy.  How  soon  will  the  great 
scientific  discoverer  appear  who  will  show  us  how  to  get 
the  like  amount  from  a  thimbleful  of  ordinary  earth  ?  It 
may  be  a  long  time,  but  we  do  not  know.  Genius,  when 
it  appears,  has  wings  with  which  it  mounts  in  a  fashion 
that  astounds  us.  Newton  and  Einstein  are  examples 
from  which  we  do  well  to  take  heed.  We  shall  be  wise 


GERMAN  INTERPRETATIONS  59 

if,  as  a  practical  nation,  we  listen  to  the  new  warnings 
which  science  is  now  giving  us  in  however  general  a 
language.  We  cannot  foresee  what  new  developments 
knowledge  may  bring  for  industry.  We  have  to  watch 
and  study  and  experiment.  Otherwise,  we  may  find 
ourselves  in  the  position  of  those  foolish  virgins  who  were 
surprised  by  the  midnight  call  while  their  lamps  were  yet 
untrimmed. 

For  the  moment  all  I  am  endeavouring  is  to  indicate  in 
bare  outline  the  general  character  of  Einstein's  revolu- 
tionary discovery.  It  is  a  triumph  of  mathematical 
genius  and  of  the  power  of  scientific  imagination  in 
adapting  the  ideas  of  his  great  predecessors,  men  like 
Gauss  and  Riemann,  to  the  solution  of  problems  of  which 
they  hardly  dreamed.  What  I  have  suggested  is  that 
the  principle  of  relativity  in  physics,  as  Einstein  has  con- 
ceived it,  is  one  so  far-reaching  that  it  is  of  importance 
for  any  theory  of  the  ultimate  character  of  reality.  This 
is  a  question  on  which  Einstein  himself,  a  mathematician 
and  physicist,  has  touched  but  little.  There  are,  however, 
disciples  of  his,  both  in  Germany  and  in  England,  who 
have  given  attention  to  it.  The  tendency  has  apparently 
been  to  treat  space  and  time  as  meaning  different  things, 
according  as  they  are  regarded  from  the  standpoint  of 
ultimate  analysis  by  mathematicians  and  physicists,  or 
from  that  of  the  intuitional  or  psychological  view  of  the 
observer.  The  two  kinds  of  space  and  time  are,  accord- 
ing to  such  writers  as  Moritz  Schlick  of  Rostock,  who  is 
a  professor  of  philosophy  as  well  as  a  mathematician,1 
"  essentially  dissimilar  and  incapable  of  comparison  with 
one  another ;  but  have,  as  our  experiences  teach  us,  a 
perfectly  definite  and  uniform  functional  relation  to 
one  another."  Space  and  time,  as  governed  by  the 
principle  of  relativity,  appear  to  be  regarded  by  Professor 
Schlick  as  not  being  the  space  and  time  directly  perceived 
in  intuitional  experience,  but  as  being  of  a  non-intuitional 
or  conceptual  character  which  has  its  foundation  in  what 
is  a  four-dimensional  manifold,  the  existence  of  which  is, 
so  far  as  we  are  concerned,  arrived  at  only  by  inference. 
But  this  suggests  a  splitting  up  of  experience  into  sensa- 
tions and  conceptions  which  seems  to  have  but  little 
warrant  in  the  actual  character  of  that  experience.  It 

1  Space  and  Time  in  Contemporary  Phytia,  Eng.  tr.,  p.  £9. 


60  RELATIVITY  IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

appears  to  be  an  attempt  influenced  by  a  superstition 
inherited  from  Kant,  who  sought  to  treat  space  and  time 
as  if  they  could  be  self-contained  pure  forms  independent 
of  concepts.  It  is  a  view  which  arises  naturally  only 
if  the  mind  is  taken  to  be  a  sort  of  thing  with  know- 
ledge, including  the  forms  of  intuition,  as  its  instrument, 
and  the  object  as  in  some  measure  self- subsis tent.  But  a 
Kantian  may  still  seek  to  hold  it  in  a  guarded  form,  and 
so  may  others  who  go  i'urther  than  Kant  in  the  same 
direction.  What  Kant  said  on  the  subject  of  space  and 
time  as  mere  forms  of  intuition,  and  therefore  of  a  self- 
subsisting  and  independent  character,  was  subsequently 
examined  by  Hegel  in  a  criticism  that  has  not  been  much 
studied  either  here  or  in  Germany.1  For  the  latter  the  pure 
form  of  time  was  just  an  abstraction.  Its  real  character 
was  that  of  Angesckaute  Werden  (Becoming  as  directly 
apprehended),  and  of  being  as  such  inseparable  from 
space.  Space,  taken  by  itself,  was  for  Hegel  the  most 
abstract  and  general  form  of  externality,  consisting  in 
mutual  exclusion  without  definite  internal  differentiation. 
But  time,  on  the  other  hand,  was  for  him  more  than 
merely  the  spatialised,  and  so  distorted  time  with  which 
mathematics  deals.  "  It  is  only  in  an  arrested,  paralysed 
form,  only  in  that  of  the  quantitative  unit,"  that  it  is  dealt 
with  in  mathematics,  in  order,  for  the  purposes  of  mathe- 
matics, to  get  an  "  indifferent,  external,  lifeless  content." 
Here  Hegel  and  Bergson  come  near  together.8 

Now  this  suggestion  is  a  very  different  one,  not  only 
from  Kant's  view,  but  from  that  of  Professor  Schlick. 
The  latter  recognises  a  world  existing  in  a  second  kind  of 
space  and  time,  apparently  harmonising  with  but  not  the 
less  independent  of  the  two  pure  forms  which  figure  in 
the  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,  the  first  conditioning  all 
externality,  the  second  inner  experience  as  well.  Some 
Kantians  in  Germany,  looking  on  this  as  a  heresy,  have 
accordingly  not  been  grateful  to  Professor  Schlick.  Ewald 
Sellien,  for  instance,  has  written  an  acute  but  compre- 
hensive essay  on  the  subject,  Die  Erkcnntnistheoretische 
Bedeutung  der  Eelativitdtstheorie  (Berlin,  1919).  It  is  an 
essay  worth  study,  by  mathematicians  as  well  as  by  philo- 
sophers, for  in  it  the  shortcomings  of  both  are  dragged 

1  Werke,  vii,  paras.  254  and  258. 

*  Werke,  ii,  p.  35.     (Preface  to  the  Phenomenology  of  Mind.) 


SELLIEN    AND    MACK'S    POSITIVISM  61 

to  light  with  some  precision.  He  discusses  the  philo- 
sophical foundation  of  the  principle  of  physical  relativity, 
taking  the  positivism  of  Mach  as  his  extreme  case,  and 
contrasting  this  with  what  is  for  himself  the  real  Kantian 
view,  which  he  defends.  As  to  Schlick,  who  does  not  go 
as  far  as  the  so-called  "  posit ivists,"  but  thinks  that  a 
relativist  may  still  remain  a  good  Kantian,  Sellien  con- 
siders that,  although  this  may  well  be  true,  Schlick  has 
misinterpreted  Kant's  teaching,  by  distinguishing  space 
and  time  into  kinds,  one  of  which  is  "  physiologico- 
psychological"  and  the  other  "  physico-logical."  But  for 
Sellien,  Kant's  pure  forms  of  intuition  are  quite  free  from 
any  physiological  or  psychological  element,  and  are  forms 
of  a  pure  intuition  which  has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with 
the  material  that  in  truth  presupposes  these  forms  only  for 
certain  aspects  of  its  order  and  arrangement.  When  Kant 
speaks  of  relations  within  such  pure  intuition  he  is  at  most 
concerned  only  with  rules  for  construction  in  it.  We 
cannot  form  an  image  of  two  equal  straight  lines,  but  we 
can  invoke  a  rule  for  their  construction  in  space,  and  so 
obtain  a  principle  which  makes  it  possible  "  to  draw  true 
conclusions  from  bad  figures."  Euclidean  geometry  is 
for  Sellien  the  appropriate  system  for  Kant's  form  of  space. 
But  it  is  for  Kant  no  necessity  of  thought,  and  other 
geometries  are  intelligible  which,  while  referring  to  what 
is  Euclidean  as  their  presupposition,  can  be  made  to 
represent  conceivable  "  objective  and  perceptual  space 
systems  of  other  kinds,  with  equal  logical  and  mathe- 
matical validity."  That  these  are  primarily  conceptual 
does  not  detract  from  their  claim  to  be  true  of  the  ulti- 
mately real.  Thus,  according  to  Sellien,  the  theory  of 
relativity  can  be  accepted  consistently  with  the  philo- 
sophy of  Kant.  For  after  all  it  is  not  with  the  merely 
general  and  abstract  character  of  space  but  with  the 
relations  of  objects  in  it  that  relativity  is  concerned.  He 
quotes  with  approval  Max  Planck  as  rejecting  the  "  posi- 
tivist  "  view,  and  declaring  that  although  physical  science 
starts  from  sense-impressions  its  principle  is  to  get  from 
these  to  what  is  independent  of  subjectivity  (endowed  with 
at  most  mere  forms),  and  possesses  universal  and  objective 
truth.  This  must  lie  in  a  reality  independent  of  the 
individual  physicist.  Planck,  to  whom  a  reference  will 
be  made  in  the  next  chapter,  appears  to  be,  for  reasons 
6 


62  RELATIVITY   IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

connected  with  what  is  known  to  physicists  as  the 
"  quanta  "  theory,  a  sceptic  about  the  general  or  wider 
principle  of  Einstein  in  reference  to  motion. 

But  Planck,  and  of  course  Sellien  himself,  will  have  none 
of  merely  empirical  "  positivism."  Its  view  of  the  objects 
of  physical  science  reduces  them  to  the  coincidence  in 
space-time  of  elements  in  passive  awareness.  Such 
elements  as  immediately  and  indirectly  experienced  are 
for  positivists  such  as  Mach  the  sole  reality.  When  in 
physics  we  speak  as  though  coincidences  of  a  less  immediate 
nature  were  actual,  we  are  only  using  abbreviated  modes 
of  speech.  The  conception,  for  example,  of  the  physical 
world  as  based  on  a  four-dimensional  reality,  its  space- 
time  continuum,  is  no  more  than  an  abridged  statement 
of  the  correspondence  of  subjective  time-space  experiences 
through  the  various  senses. 

According  to  the  writer  I  am  quoting,  Sellien,  this 
principle  of  "  positivism  "  has  influenced  unduly  not  only 
Einstein  but  his  predecessors  in  his  own  field  of  work. 
For  them  mathematics  has  been  only  a  branch  of  physics. 
He  cites  Gauss  as  having  said  :  "I  am  coming  more  and 
more  to  the  conclusion  that  the  necessary  character  of  our 
geometry  cannot  be  proved.  .  .  .  Geometry  must  have  the 
same  rank  assigned  to  it  as  physics."  Sellien  declares 
that  Riemann  and  Helmholtz  took  the  same  view  as  Gauss, 
and  that  Minkowski,  Freundlich,  and  Einstein  have  followed 
them  in  it.  He  is  not  sure  that  this  is  as  true  of  Minkowski 
as  it  is  of  the  others,  inasmuch  as  he,  in  the  famous  address 
on  Space  in  Time  referred  to  in  the  next  chapter  of  this 
book,  expressed  the  opinion  that  ordinary  three-dimen- 
sional geometry  is  only  a  chapter  of  four-dimensional 
physics,  and  could  be  deduced  from  the  latter  if  the  time 
co-ordinate  was  always  treated  as  zero.  For  himself, 
and  those  who  like  himself  believe  in  Kantianism,  Sellien 
sums  up  his  conclusions  thus :  "  In  the  problem  of  space- 
time  what  we  are  concerned  with  are  questions  of  measure- 
ment, and  not  questions  relating  to  space  and  time  as 
forms  of  intuition."  The  doctrine  of  Kant  is  not,  he  thinks, 
inconsistent  with  that  of  Einstein,  but  the  doctrine  of 
Newton  is  inconsistent  with  it.  The  problem  of  Kant  was 
of  a  nature  quite  distinct  from  that  of  Einstein,  but 
wherever  there  is  contact  there  is  no  real  obstacle  to 
harmony. 


PROFESSOR  WHITEHEAD'S   INTERPRETATION     63 

I  have  thought  it  worth  while  to  refer  to  the  controversy 
in  Germany  about  the  foundational  principles  on  which 
relativity  rests  in  order  to  show  that  the  "  bifurcation  " 
tendency  has  had  its  analogue  there,  although  in  a  different 
form  from  that  which  obtains  in  Britain.  I  will  only  add 
that  even  Kantianism  itself  cannot  be  said  to  be  free  from 
the  tendency  to  disjoin  the  various  characters  manifested 
in  experience. 

Now  this  supposed  disjunction  or  bifurcation  is  being 
stoutly  contested,  at  least  in  this  country,  from  a  scientific 
point  of  view.  It  is  interesting  that  an  explanation  has 
been  insisted  on  in  England  of  the  whole  doctrine  of  rela- 
tivity which  not  only  denies  the  disjunction,  but  is  more 
thorough  in  the  logical  treatment  of  relativity  than  any- 
thing that  I  have  so  far  become  acquainted  with  in  the 
works  either  of  Einstein  himself  or  of  his  disciples  in 
Germany. 

The  author  of  this  explanation  is  Professor  A.  N.  White- 
head,  who  has  set  it  forth  in  detail  in  two  recent  books, 
The  Principles  of  Natural  Knowledge  and  The  Concept  oj 
Nature,  books  which  must  be  studied  together  if  they  are 
to  be  fully  understood.  The  writer  is  not  only  a  mathe- 
matician of  eminence.  He  is  equally  distinguished  in  the 
new  department  of  mathematical  logic,  a  department  in 
which  he  and  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell,  with  a  small  but  dis- 
tinguished group  of  well-known  writers  on  such  subjects 
as  number,  in  France,  Germany,  Italy,  and  America,  have 
been  pioneers.  If  the  questions  dealt  with  were  purely 
mathematical,  I  should  not  presume  to  comment  on  the 
argument  about  them.  In  that  case  the  task  could  fall 
only  to  one  adequately  trained  in  the  very  highest  mathe- 
matics. But  as  a  matter  of  fact  the  inquiry  is  not  only 
one  that  is  logical  as  much  as  mathematical,  but  it  conducts 
the  student  into  a  region  which  is  obviously  a  region  of 
metaphysics,  a  fact  which  is  apt  to  become  overlooked. 
Not  by  Professor  Whitehead,  for  he  is  not  only  aware  of  it 
but  is  careful  to  disclaim  any  philosophical  assumption. 
Still,  he  pushes  his  method  of  logical  analysis  to  a  point 
where  it  seems  to  me  to  have  taken  him  over  the  border- 
line, for  reasons  which  I  shall  have  to  indicate  later  on. 
Meantime  what  I  am  concerned  with  is  to  show,  by  refer- 
ence to  his  teaching,  on  how  different  a  footing  he  has 
sought  to  place  the  doctrine  of  relativity  from  that  on 


64  RELATIVITY  IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

which  it  has  been  left  by  Einstein  and  his  disciples.  From 
their  practical  results  Professor  Whitehead  does  not 
dissent,  and  he  fully  accepts  the  greatness  of  Einstein's 
discovery  and  of  its  consequences.  What  he  does  is  to 
exhibit  it  in  a  new  meaning.  I  may  add  that  in  the 
borderland  where  the  mathematician  and  the  logician  and 
metaphysician  meet,  the  conceptions  employed  by  the 
first  have  the  almost  paradoxical  character  of  presenting 
less  of  strangeness  to  the  latter  than  do  their  results  to 
many  highly  trained  mathematicians.  Just  as  a  merchant 
may  not  be  able  to  add  up  his  bank-book  as  correctly  as 
the  bank  officials  can  (and  I  have  known  even  a  senior 
wrangler  to  be  wanting  here),  but  yet  knows  from  a 
standpoint  different  from  that  of  the  expert  a  peculiar 
significance  which  the  result  has  for  himself,  so  Gaussian 
co-ordinates  and  tensors  present  a  significance  for  logic  and 
metaphysics  which  is  something  additional  to  that  which 
they  have  for  one  who  is  a  mathematician  alone.  It  is 
this  further  significance,  always  giving  rise  to  new  problems 
which  lie  beyond  the  domain  of  the  pure  mathematician, 
which  invests  such  conceptions  with  unusual  obscurity  for 
him.  The  difficulty  of  following  them  presents  of  course 
great  trouble  to  the  philosophers.  But  the  significance 
of  the  standpoint  attained  may  seem  less  strange  to  the 
philosophers  on  whose  studies  it  bears  closely,  although 
they  find  much  difficulty  in  treading  in  the  steps  by  which 
the  pure  mathematician  has  been  able  to  climb  up  to  it. 
Something  analogous  seems  to  me  to  be  true  of  such  special 
sciences  as  biology  and  sociology.  All  such  sciences  tend 
increasingly  to  illustrate  the  fact  that  knowledge  is  really 
an  entirety,  the  aspects  of  which  can  be  separated  only 
provisionally. 

As  I  have  observed  earlier,  Professor  Whitehead  is  reso- 
lutely opposed  to  the  old  Victorian  view  of  the  division  of 
nature  into  what  exist  only  subjectively,  the  secondary 
qualities  which  appear  only  in  sense-perception,  such  as 
colour  and  the  feeling  of  touch,  and  what  is  taken,  on  the 
other  hand,  to  exist  in  itself  in  absolute  and  independent 
space  and  time,  the  supposed  primary  entities  of  geometry 
and  physics.  He  will  have  nothing  of  the  assumption 
on  which  such  a  division  is  based.  His  purpose  is  to  take 
nature  as  it  seems,  and  to  ascertain  by  adequate  analysis 
the  kinds  of  entities  and  of  relations  between  them  which 


HIS  ANALYSIS   OF  NATURE  65 

are  disclosed  in  our  perception  of  nature.  He  does  not 
seek  to  discover  the  whole  of  what  nature  discloses.  Social, 
ethical,  and  aesthetic  phenomena,  for  instance,  are  outside 
the  physical  science  to  which  his  method  is  confined,  and 
so,  to  a  large  extent,  is  life  itself,  although  certain  aspects 
of  biological  character  exhibit  rhythmic  relations  on  which 
he  touches.  He  confines  himself  in  the  main  to  the 
phenomena  of  which  physics  must  take  account,  and  his 
method  of  treatment  is  to  take  nature  in  this  aspect  as 
"  closed  to  mind,"  that  is,  as  there  independently  of  it. 
For  reasons  which  will  appear  later  on  I  do  not  think  he 
succeeds  in  separating  nature  from  mind.  Indeed,  he  is 
careful  to  say  that  he  commits  himself  to  no  metaphysical 
assumption  on  the  point.  His  purpose  is  to  proceed  in  the 
only  way  he  takes  to  be  legitimate  for  a  mathematical 
physicist.  But  even  in  this  he  cannot  wholly  divest  him- 
self of  a  philosophical  garment.  For  he  has  to  declare  that 
experience  is  "  significant."  For  Berkeley  significance 
meant  that  God  was  indicating  to  us  a  meaning,  that  of  an 
ordered  world,  through  a  series  of  self-contained  signs  which 
our  minds  received  and  then  interpreted.  The  signs,  or 
ideas,  had  their  own  existence  detachable  from  the  signific- 
ance. That  was  why  his  doctrine  fell  a  prey  to  the 
scepticism  of  Hume.  But  Kant  would  have  nothing  to  do 
with  Berkeley's  view.  He  declared  that  significance  and 
experience  were  the  same  thing,  and  that  they  were 
therefore  incapable  of  being  detached  even  in  theory  from 
each  other,  as  Hume  had  sought  to  do. 

All  this  Professor  Whitehead  expounds  with  lucidity 
and  freshness  at  an  early  stage  in  his  Principles.  He 
declares  the  nature  of  significance  to  be  a  fundamental 
question  for  the  philosophy  of  natural  knowledge.  "  To 
say  that  significance  is  experience  is  to  affirm  that  per- 
ceptual knowledge  is  nothing  else  than  an  apprehension  of 
the  relatedness  of  things."  We  must  not  look  round,  he 
says,  for  a  knowledge  of  things  and  then  seek  their  rela- 
tions, which  in  that  case  we  shall  not  find.  "  Natural 
knowledge  is  a  knowledge  from  within  nature,  a  knowledge 
1  here '  within  nature  and  '  now '  within  nature,  and  is  an 
awareness  of  the  natural  relations  of  one  element  in  nature  " 
(the  "percipient  event,"  or  a  bodily  awareness  of  simul- 
taneous relations  of  all  nature  to  this  awareness)  "  to  the 
rest  of  nature."  He  seems  here  to  accept  the  "  internality '- 


66  RELATIVITY   IN  AN   ENGLISH   FORM 

of  relations  to  their  relata,  in  a  way  that  is  not  consistent 
with  the  doctrine  of  those  New  Realists  who  treat  the 
relata  as  entities  separate  from  relations  that  are  external 
to  them  and  self-subsistent. 

The  fundamental  characteristic  of  nature  is  the 
"  passage  "  of  its  events.  Nature  is  always  moving,  and 
sense- awareness  is  always  seizing  on  the  passing  events 
as  they  extend  over  each  other.  For  sense- awareness  this 
extension  is  a  present  fact,  the  unity  expressed  in  which 
we  call  simultaneity.  It  is  what  is  discerned.  Professor 
Whitehead  names  it  a  "  duration."  But  this  does  not 
mean  an  abstract  stretch  of  time.  We  have  not  yet  got 
to  time.  It  is  just  a  section  of  nature  as  for  awareness, 
limited  by  the  apparent  simultaneity  of  what  it  includes. 
It  is  not,  however,  a  perfect  simultaneity,  or  a  moment. 
For,  again,  this  would  require  the  concept  of  time  for  its 
definition,  and  we  have  not  yet  reached  this  concept.  It 
is  what  has  been  called  the  "  specious  present,"  which  for 
a  more  delicate  awareness  might  have  smaller  durations 
into  which  it  was  divided.  Nature  is  thus  a  process  to 
which  each  duration  belongs.  In  this  view  of  the  funda- 
mental character  of  nature  being  passage  the  author  comes 
near  to  the  view  of  Bergson,  but  he  will  not  allow  passage 
to  be  identified  with  time,  even  as  much  as  Bergson  does. 
Passage  is  rather  the  fundamental  feature  of  nature  from 
which  both  time  and  space  are  constructed  by  our  abstrac- 
tions. It  is  easy  to  see  how  he  approaches  to  the  space- 
time  continuum  on  which  Einstein,  in  agreement  with 
Minkowski,  lays  so  much  stress.  For  the  physical  basis 
of  this  continuum  is  just  the  quality  of  passage  in  events. 
These,  while  they  occur  in  a  duration,  extend  over  each 
other,  so  that  we  have  a  foundation  on  which  we  erect 
the  conceptions  of  both  time  and  space,  thus  themselves 
merely  derivative  in  character. 

But  events  merely  as  such  could  not  be  identified.  They 
pass,  and  cannot  be  recognised.  For  recognition  is  aware- 
ness of  sameness,  and  each  event  is  by  its  nature  essentially 
and  wholly  distinct  from  every  other.  What  we  recognise 
as  continuing  the  same  must  therefore  be  something  that 
does  not  pass.  This  Professor  Whitehead  calls  an 
"  object."  It  does  not  share  in  the  passage  of  nature,  and 
it  is  the  result  of  an  act  of  comparison.  He  says,  however, 
that  there  can  be  a  non-intellectual  relation  of  sense- 


EVENTS   AND   OBJECTS  67 

awareness  which  connects  the  mind  with  a  factor  of  nature 
without  passage.  Now  there  are  clearly  objects  in  nature 
as  it  presents  itself  to  us.  Otherwise  experience  would 
be  devoid  of  significance,  and  there  could  be  no  knowledge 
and  no  science.  How  can  this  be  ?  The  answer  he  gives 
is  that  events  have  characters  in  accordance  with  which 
they  shape  themselves.  The  objects  are  ingredient  in  these 
characters,  and  make  them  what  they  are.  It  is  in  virtue 
of  the  ingression  into  events  of  objects  that  the  events 
body  forth  permanences  in  virtue  of  which  they  can  be 
compared.  Nature  as  we  find  it  is  such  that  there  can  be 
no  events  and  no  objects  without  the  ingression  of  objects 
into  events. 

Pausing  at  this  sentence  in  Professor  Whitehead's 
analysis,  the  metaphysician  will  hold  up  his  hands.  The 
portal  of  nature  was  to  be  bolted  and  barred  against  mind, 
but  mind  has  apparently  gone  round  the  corner,  got  in 
by  a  back  door,  and  taken  possession  of  the  building. 
"  Events,"  "  recognition,"  "  objects  "  !  Here  we  have 
knowledge  with  all  its  implications,  and  knowledge  in 
which  the  "  significance,"  which  for  Professor  Whitehead 
is  the  reality  of  our  experience  of  nature,  consists.  I  am 
far  from  complaining.  I  am  in  agreement  with  the  author. 
But  I  feel  I  have  been  led  by  him  into  territory  which 
seems  not  new,  but  somewhat  familiar  to  me.  If  we  went 
a  little  further  we  might  expect,  and  not  without  reason, 
to  find  that  the  boundary-line  between  mind  and  nature, 
and  the  entire  distinction  between  them,  fell  within  know- 
ledge as  having  been  established  only  by  reflection. 

But  this  does  not  detract  from  the  interest  of  the  method 
of  treatment.  It  is  searching  as  no  other  method  of 
scientific  treatment  of  the  problem  has  been  searching. 
The  author  is  not  afraid  to  say  that  objects  in  our  know- 
ledge of  nature  may  be  no  more  than  logical  abstractions. 
They  may  indeed  be  posited  by  sense- awareness  itself, 
but  even  when  they  are  not  so  posited  they  may  belong 
to  nature.  He  lays  stress  on  the  way  in  which  educated 
language  about  space  and  time  has  been  made  to  conform 
to  the  orthodox  Newtonian  view  of  these  as  absolute  frame- 
works, with  points  as  fixed  entities  in  them.  If  there  is  no 
absolute  but  only  relative  position  a  point  cannot  be  such 
an  entity.  "  What  is  a  point  to  one  man  in  a  balloon  with 
his  eyes  fixed  on  an  instrument  is  a  track  of  points  to  an 


68  RELATIVITY  IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

observer  on  the  earth  who  is  watching  the  balloon  through 
a  telescope,  and  is  another  track  of  points  to  an  observer 
in  the  sun  who  is  watching  the  balloon  through  some 
instrument  suited  to  such  a  being."  1  "If  you  admit 
the  relativity  of  space,  you  also  must  admit  that  points 
are  complex  entities,  logical  constructs  involving  other 
entities  and  their  relations."  "  When  you  once  admit 
that  the  points  are  radically  different  entities  for  differing 
assumptions  of  rest,  then  the  orthodox  formulae  lose  all 
their  obviousness.  They  were  only  obvious  because  you 
were  really  thinking  of  something  else.  When  discussing 
this  topic  you  can  only  avoid  paradox  by  taking  refuge  in 
the  comfortable  ark  of  no  meaning."  Events,  says  this 
mathematician,  are  named  after  the  prominent  objects 
situated  in  them,  and  thus,  both  in  language  and  in 
thought,  the  event  sinks  behind  the  object,  and  becomes 
the  mere  play  of  its  relations.  The  theory  of  space  is  thus 
converted  into  a  theory  of  the  relations  of  objects,  instead 
of  being  a  theory  of  the  relations  of  events.  But  objects 
have  not  the  passage  of  events.  Accordingly  space  treated 
as  a  relation  between  objects  is  divorced  from  its  connec- 
tion with  time.  It  is  space  at  an  instant  without  any 
determinate  relations  between  the  spaces  at  successive 
instants.  It  cannot  really  be  one  time-less  space,  because 
the  relations  between  objects  change.  In  other  words,  it 
is  a  conception  ot  reflection  gotten  by  an  abstraction. 

It  will  be  convenient  to  see  what  result  this  acute  critic 
of  orthodox  physical  science  reaches  as  his  conclusion, 
before  proceeding  to  his  relation  to  the  Einstein  doctrine. 
At  p.  167  of  the  Concept  of  Nature  he  sums  up  the  con- 
trast between  what  ought  to  be  said  and  what  is  commonly 
said.  I  will  give  the  passage  in  his  own  words  : 

"  The  concrete  facts  of  nature  are  events  exhibiting  a 
certain  structure  in  their  mutual  relations  and  certain 
characters  of  their  own.  The  aim  of  science  is  to  express 
the  relations  between  their  characters  in  terms  of  the 
mutual  structural  relations  between  the  events  thus 
characterised.  The  mutual  structural  relations  between 
events  are  both  spatial  and  temporal.  If  you  think  of 
them  as  merely  spatial  you  are  omitting  the  temporal 
element,  and  if  you  think  of  them  as  merely  temporal  you 
Concept  oj  Nature,  p.  135. 


HIS    VIEW    OF    SPACE    AND    TIME  69 

omitting  the  spatial  element.  Thus  when  you  think 
of  space  alone,  or  of  time  alone,  you  are  dealing  in  abstrac- 
tions, namely,  you  are  leaving  out  an  essential  element  in 
the  life  of  nature  as  known  to  you  in  the  experience  of  your 
senses.  Furthermore,  there  are  different  ways  of  making 
these  abstractions  which  we  think  of  as  space  and  as  time ; 
and  under  some  circumstances  we  adopt  one  way  and 
under  other  circumstances  we  adopt  another  way.  Thus 
there  is  no  paradox  in  holding  that  what  we  mean  by  space 
under  one  set  of  circumstances  is  not  what  we  mean  by 
space  under  another  set  of  circumstances.  And  equally 
what  we  mean  by  time  under  one  set  of  circumstances  is 
not  what  we  mean  by  time  under  another  set  of  circum- 
stances. By  saying  that  space  and  time  are  abstractions, 
I  do  not  mean  that  they  do  not  express  for  us  real  facts 
about  nature.  What  I  mean  is  that  there  are  no  spatial 
facts  or  temporal  facts  apart  from  physical  nature,  namely 
that  space  and  time  are  merely  ways  of  expressing  certain 
truths  about  the  relations  between  events.  Also  that  under 
different  circumstances  there  are  different  sets  of  truths 
about  the  universe  which  are  naturally  presented  to  us 
as  statements  about  space.  In  such  a  case  what  a  being 
under  the  one  set  of  circumstances  means  by  space  will  be 
different  from  that  meant  by  a  being  under  the  other  set  of 
circumstances.  Accordingly,  when  we  are  comparing  two 
observations  made  under  different  circumstances  we  have 
to  ask,  '  Do  the  two  observers  mean  the  same  thing  by 
space  and  the  same  thing  by  time  ?  '  The  modern  theory 
of  relativity  has  arisen  because  certain  perplexities  as  to 
the  concordance  of  certain  delicate  observations,  such  as 
the  motion  of  the  earth  through  the  ether,  the  perihelion 
of  Mercury,  and  the  positions  of  the  stars  in  the  neighbour- 
hood of  the  sun,  have  been  solved  by  reference  to  this 
purely  relative  significance  of  space  and  time." 

The  quotation  I  have  just  given  indicates  Professor 
Whitehead's  attitude  towards  the  view  of  the  school  of 
Einstein  about  space  and  time.  With  them  relations  in 
space  and  time  are  constructions  by  the  mind  of  the 
observer,  whose  measurements  are  dependent  on  his  system 
of  reference.  They  are,  as  I  have  already  pointed  out, 
in  a  large  measure  merely  subjective,  and  quite  distinct 
from  the  relations  in  the  space-time  continuum  which  is 
the  underlying  fact  in  what  we  perceive.  For  Professor 


70  RELATIVITY   IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

Whitehead,  on  the  other  hand,  space  and  time  are  objects 
which  are  no  doubt  constructed  by  what  are  in  reality 
abstract  methods,  but  they  are  based  on  the  events  in  the 
passage  of  nature  to  which  the  continuum  belongs.  They 
stand  for  what  is  actually  present  to  us,  although  observed 
indirectly  and  under  differing  circumstances,  which  may 
produce  variations  in  the  character  of  what  is  so  observed. 
For  him  there  is  thus  a  single  reality,  while  for  the  school 
of  Einstein  there  are  apparently  two,  one  intuitional, 
or  passively  and  directly  apprehended,  and  the  other 
conceptual.  Space  and  time  do  actually  exist  in  nature 
for  the  author  of  the  Concept  of  Nature,  but  they  have 
many  varieties. 

Whether  or  not  Professor  Whitehead  is  justified  in  his 
conclusions,  he  has  at  all  events  arrived  at  them  by  a 
method  of  a  strict  order.  As  I  have  said,  he  is  one  of  the 
most  prominent  of  the  exponents  of  the  modern  school, 
which  seeks  the  foundations  of  mathematics  in  logic  and 
has  produced  new  methods  of  investigation.  One  of  these 
has  been  invented  by  Professor  Whitehead  himself,  and  it 
is  by  restricting  himself,  as  far  as  possible,  to  what  is 
in  harmony  with  this  method  that  he  arrives  at  the 
results  described  in  detail  in  his  two  books,  results  to  the 
general  character  of  which  I  have  now  referred.  The 
method  is  that  of  "  Extensive  Abstraction."  Its  purpose 
in  this  connection  is  to  express  in  terms  of  physical  objects 
the  various  roles  of  events  as  active  conditions  in  the 
ingression  of  sense- objects  into  nature.  It  will  be  remem- 
bered that  although  objects  are  products  of  recognition  of 
sameness,  and  so  of  abstract  reflection  in  which  they  lose 
the  quality  of  passage  that  is  inherent  in  events,  still  they 
belong  to  nature  as  an  essential  part  of  its  significance,  and 
therefore  as  not  merely  subjective  but  as  actual.  Now 
this  is  not  the  less  true,  merely  because  they  may  be  per- 
ceived as  varying  with  the  situation  of  the  observer.  In 
the  progress  of  the  investigation  of  nature  there  emerge 
scientific  objects,  which  embody  those  aspects  of  the 
character  of  the  situation  of  physical  objects  that  are  most 
permanent,  and  that  are  capable  of  expression  without 
reference  to  a  multiple  relation  including  the  percipient 
event  of  our  bodily  awareness.  The  relations  to  each 
other  of  scientific  objects  thus  become  characterised  by  a 
certain  simplicity  and  uniformity,  so  that  the  characters 


THE    METHOD    OF    EXTENSIVE    ABSTRACTION     71 

of  observed  physical  objects  can  be  expressed  in  terms 
of  scientific  objects.  These  are  no  mere  formulas  for  calcu- 
lation, because  formulas  must  refer  to  things  in  nature, 
and  scientific  objects,  for  instance  electrons,  are  the  things 
in  nature  to  which  the  formulas  refer. 

Take  as  an  illustration  time  and  space  themselves.  The 
determination  of  the  meaning  of  nature  is  largely  concerned 
with  the  characters  of  time  and  of  space  as  objects.  They 
are  abstracted  from  events,  and  when  we  pursue  their 
investigation  we  find  that  they  are  inseparable,  and  that 
their  measurements  involve  each  other,  as  in  the  modern 
theory  of  electro- magnetic  relativity,  brought  to  light  by 
the  researches  of  Clerk  Maxwell  and  others.  Looking  at 
time  as  an  object  per  se,  it  is  the  ordered  succession  of 
durationless  instants,  which  are  known  to  us  merely  as 
relata  in  the  time  series,  the  relation  in  which  we  know 
merely  as  the  one-dimensional  order  in  which  instants 
follow  each  other.  Thus  the  instant  and  the  relation  imply 
each  other.  Taken  as  self-subsistent  this  would  give  us 
time  as  an  absolute  system.  But  such  bare  time  is  to  be 
found  nowhere  in  nature.  What  we  call  time,  and  make 
our  object  in  reflective  perception,  is  derived  from  our 
awareness  of  the  passage  of  events.  It  is  this  concrete 
and  factual  passage,  and  the  cardinal  fact  that  the  events 
that  pass  are  not  isolated  entities,  but  in  our  awareness  of 
them  extend  over  each  other,  that  form  the  materials  from 
which  we  construct  our  notions  of  time  and  space. 

The  method  of  extensive  abstraction  is  Professor  White- 
head's  way  of  exhibiting  this  conclusion  with  the  reasons 
for  it.  It  is  a  method  which  in  its  sphere  achieves  the 
same  object  as  does  the  differential  calculus  in  the  region 
of  numerical  calculation,  for  it  converts  a  process  of 
approximation  into  an  instrument  of  exact  thought.  At 
the  same  time  he  claims  that  it  is  merely  the  systematisa- 
tion  of  the  instinctive  procedure  of  our  habitual  tendency 
in  practical  life  to  seek  simplicity  in  relations  between 
events  by  excluding  all  but  what  is  small  and  simple 
enough  to  be  definitely  formulated.  The  principle  of 
extensive  abstraction  gives  rules  by  which  this  is  to  be 
achieved,  and  its  results  can  be  indefinitely  prolonged. 
Thus  we  get  at  a  precise  "  route  of  approximation,"  and 
we  arrive  by  it  at  results  of  reflection,  such  as  "  event- 
particles,"  points  in  instantaneous  space,  and  moments  of 


72  RELATIVITY  IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

time  in  each  of  which  all  nature  is  instantaneously  there, 
with  the  volume  incident  to  such  moments.  Elements 
such  as  these  form  the  exactly  determined  concepts  on 
which  the  fabric  of  science  rests. 

An  illustration  which  the  author  gives  may  be  useful  as 
indicating  the  way  in  which  the  approach  to  simplicity  is 
made  by  convergence  of  the  infinite  series  formed  by  an 
abstractive  set  towards  the  limiting  character  of  the  natural 
relation  sought  after.  This  last  is  what  is  called  its 
intrinsic  character,  while  the  properties  belonging  to  the 
relation  of  whole  and  part  between  its  members  are  called 
its  extrinsic  character.  These  properties  guide  us  to  the 
intrinsic  character,  which  emerges  from  the  convergence 
and  is  its  limit.  "  We  see  a  train  approaching  during  a 
minute.  The  event  which  is  the  life  of  nature  during  the 
minute  is  of  great  complexity,  and  the  expression  of  its 
relations  and  of  the  ingredients  of  its  character  baffles  us. 
If  we  take  one  second  of  that  minute,  the  more  limited 
event  which  is  thus  obtained  is  simpler  in  respect  to  its 
ingredients,  and  shorter  and  shorter  times  such  as  a  tenth 
of  that  second,  or  a  hundredth  or  a  thousandth — so  long 
as  we  have  a  definite  rule  giving  a  definite  succession  of 
diminishing  events — give  events  whose  ingredient  charac- 
ters converge  to  the  ideal  simplicity  of  the  character  of  the 
train  at  a  definite  instant.  Furthermore,  there  are  different 
types  of  such  convergence  to  simplicity.  For  example,  we 
can  converge  as  above  to  the  limiting  character  expressing 
nature  at  an  instant  within  the  whole  volume  of  the  train 
at  that  instant,  or  to  nature  at  an  instant  within  some 
portion  of  that  volume — for  example  within  the  boiler  of 
the  engine— or  to  nature  at  an  instant  on  some  area  of 
surface,  or  to  nature  at  an  instant  on  some  line  within  the 
train,  or  to  nature  at  an  instant  at  some  point  of  the  train. 
In  the  last  case  the  simple  limiting  characters  arrived  at 
will  be  expressed  as  densities,  specific  gravities,  and  types 
of  material.  Furthermore,  we  need  not  necessarily  con- 
verge to  an  abstraction  which  involves  nature  at  an  instant. 
We  may  converge  to  the  physical  ingredients  of  a  certain 
point-track  throughout  the  whole  minute.  Accordingly 
there  are  different  types  of  extrinsic  character  of  con- 
vergence which  lead  to  the  approximation  to  different 
types  of  intrinsic  character  as  limits."  l 
i  Concept  of  Nature,  p.  82. 


THE  SPACE-TIME  CONTINUUM  73 

What  has  been  said  may  suffice  to  give  some  indication 
of  the  method  which  Professor  Whitehead  applies  in  his 
investigation.  The  application  of  it  to  his  problems 
requires  for  its  explanation  logical  and  mathematical 
technicalities  on  which  it  would  be  out  of  place  to  enter 
here,  and  for  these  I  must  accordingly  refer  the  reader  to 
the  two  books.  What  I  can  do  is  to  add  to  what  has  been 
said  about  the  instrument  a  little  about  the  results  its 
author  reaches  with  it. 

The  space- time  continuum,  which  underlies  our  per- 
ceptual experiences  of  space  and  time  as  popularly 
conceived,  is  itself  no  doubt  an  object  constructed  by  recog- 
nition. However  much,  therefore,  it  is  foundational  it  is 
"  conceptual."  In  saying  so  I  am  alleging  nothing  against 
the  factual  character  which  has  been  given  to  it  by  both 
Professor  Whitehead  and  Einstein.  For  our  experience 
is  always  "  significant,"  and  this  conception  may  well  be 
essential  in  that  significance. 

But  if  the  space- time  continuum  is  real,  notwithstanding 
its  conceptual  character,  can  the  same  be  said  for  instants 
or  moments  in  time  and  bare  points  in  space  ?  Professor 
Whitehead  would  certainly  reply  in  the  affirmative.  For 
him  these  cannot  be  less  than  "  scientific  objects  "  required 
for  the  interpretation  of  nature,  and  they  therefore  form 
part  of  its  significance  and  so  of  its  reality.  They  give 
us  reality,  but  in  forms  fashioned  by  interpretation.  They 
are  not  "  events,"  but  they  are  objects  which  enter  into  the 
character  which  events  assume  in  our  experience.  Hence 
they  may  be  of  the  greatest  importance  for  science,  and 
must  be  closely  defined.  This  he  seeks  to  do.  Consider 
position  in  space  at  an  instant.  All  nature  must  be  treated 
as  bounded  by  that  instant.  Under  the  method  of  abstrac- 
tion its  instantaneous  space  becomes  the  assemblage  of 
abstractive  elements  covered  by  the  instant.  How  do 
these  get  position?  By  the  intersection,  brought  about 
by  reflection,  of  two  moments,  the  locus  of  which  inter- 
section is  the  assemblage  of  abstractive  elements  covered 
by  both  of  them.  Two  moments  which  are  successive  and 
so  mutually  exclusive  cannot  be  thought  of  as  intersecting, 
and  therefore  the  abstractive  elements  they  cover  are  not 
conceived  as  doing  so.  Corresponding  lines  in  them  con- 
sequently neither  do  nor  can  intersect.  Along  this  path  we 
get  to  parallelism.  If  the  moments  are  not  successive,  but 


74  RELATIVITY   IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

belongto  different  and  independent  temporal  series,  their  con- 
tents may  intersect.  That  is  to  say,  there  may  be  a  common 
assemblage  of  abstractive  elements,  which  we  recognise  as 
of  an  overlapping  character,  although  belonging  to  more 
moments  than  one.  The  application  of  the  method  to  the 
railway  train  in  the  passage  just  quoted  shows  how  this 
may  be  so.  Such  an  intersection  of  geometrical  elements 
in  the  space  of  one  instant  by  geometrical  elements  of  the 
space  of  another  instant  gives  rise  to  planes,  lines,  and 
points.  Speaking  generally,  position  is  the  quality  which 
an  abstractive  element  possesses  in  virtue  of  the  inter- 
secting moments  in  which  it  lies.  When  he  is  dealing  with 
these  elements  as  strictly  confined  to  instantaneous  space, 
Professor  Whitehead  reserves  for  them  the  expressions 
44  levels,"  "  rects,"  and  "  puncts."  It  was  bad  enough 
for  Einstein  to  have  compelled  the  physicists  to  think  of 
the  space- time  continuum;  and  of  the  relations  of  its  point- 
events  or  event-particles,  in  "  Tensors,"  the  result  of  a 
calculus  so  refined  that  it  can  express  the  intervals  between 
them  in  terms  of  functions  of  variables  that  are  independent 
of  any  particular  form  in  space  and  time.  When  Einstein 
did  this  he  chastised  the  physicists  with  whips,  but 
Whitehead  has  chastised  the  mathematicians  with  scor- 
pions. They  have  now,  as  the  outcome  of  his  logic,  to 
think  of  space  relations  as  divested  of  all  covering  for 
their  nakedness  from  succession.  "  What,"  the  plain  man 
will  exclaim,  "  is  an  instant  of  time  that  stands  in  no  rela- 
tion to  any  succeeding  instant,  and  what  is  an  assemblage 
of  points  so  isolated  that  you  are  not  allowed  to  compare 
them  by  looking  successively  from  one  to  the  other  ?  " 
He  begins  to  think  gently  of  those  who  once  asked  him 
whether  there  was  any  difference  between  mere  being  in 
general  and  mere  not-being  in  general.  He  took  them  to 
be  preposterously  asserting  that  to  have  half  a  crown  was 
as  good  as  not  to  have  it.  But  he  comes  to  believe  that 
those  to  whom  he  attributed  such  an  enormity  may  quite 
unduly  have  been  made  scapegoats,  when  he  looks  on  the 
outrage  against  current  ideas  now  indulged  in  by  the  new 
logicians  of  modern  mathematics  and  physics. 

The  truth,  however,  is  that  the  plain  man  is  wrong.  If 
he  will  abstain  from  easy-going  speculation  about  articles 
which  pertain  to  the  ultimate  character  of  reality  he  will 
be  troubled  by  none  of  these  apparitions,  and  will  escape 


VARYING  SPACE-TIME   SYSTEMS  75 

from  his  fear  of  intellectual  and  spiritual  bankruptcy. 
With  the  mathematicians  and  physicists  it  is  otherwise. 
Their  sciences  cannot  stand  still.  Bold  leaders,  like  Ein- 
stein and  Whitehead,  are  beckoning  them  forward,  from 
ground  which  is  treacherous  into  territory  which  may  or 
may  not  prove  secure.  It  is  true  that  in  the  new  region 
they  will  find  themselves  fraternising,  first  with  logicians 
and  then  with  metaphysicians.  It  cannot  be  helped. 
Knowledge  is  a  whole,  and  those  who  pursue  it  are  not  only 
fellow-men  but  brothers  in  its  pursuit. 

These  new  ideas  are  not  so  remote  from  ordinary  ex- 
perience as  they  seem.  The  actual  realities  to  which  they 
relate  turn  on  the  degrees  to  which  reflection  can  be 
carried.  My  dog  reflects,  but  only  up  to  a  point  beyond 
which  he  fashions  no  concepts  to  carry  him.  He  knows 
nothing,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  of  parallelism  or  even  of  space 
as  differentiated  definitely  from  time.  But  he  is  aware 
of  the  continuity  of  events,  and  he  even  estimates  its 
flow  by  coincidences,  the  feeling  in  his  stomach,  for  example, 
of  hunger  which  heralds  his  supper-time.  Place  of  satis- 
faction, too,  he  associates  by  an  analogous  coincidence  in 
his  experiences  with  the  kitchen  door.  He  is  thus  aware  of 
something  resembling  in  character  what  Minkowski  called 
the  "  world-line,"  a  continuous  flow  in  which  events 
become  distinguished,  even  in  the  absence  of  measurement. 
But  geometrical  relations  exist,  not  for  him,  but  only 
for  those  who  can  reflect  at  the  level  they  require. 

So  far  Professor  Whitehead  has  shown  the  way  to  a 
plurality  of  space  and  time  systems.  These  contain 
objects  based  on  events  of  which  the  observer  is  aware, 
and  which  in  full  perception  he  discriminates  into  objects 
and  relations  based  on  them.  The  objects  are  in  this 
sense  things,  and  not  mere  thoughts.  But  with  the 
intrusion  of  the  recognition  that  is  required,  the  objects 
are  recognised  as  related  to  perception ;  to  what  he 
speaks  of  as  the  percipient  event,  and  as  coming  within 
the  duration  of  its  awareness.  They  are  thus  perceived 
with  variations  depending  on  the  circumstances  in  which 
observation  takes  place.  It  is  so  that  space  and  time 
systems  arise,  and,  as  their  genesis  is  from  relations 
between  objects,  the  systems  may  vary  and  the  space  and 
time  be  relative  in  form  and  in  measurement.  The  "  dis- 
tances "  between  event-particles,  what  Einstein  calls 


76  RELATIVITY  IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

"  point-events,"  may  be  the  foundation,  according  to 
differences  in  the  positions  of  observers,  of  a  space  the 
co-ordinates  of  which  are  curvilinear  and  not  straight, 
or  of  a  time  the  units  of  which  imply  differing  measure- 
ments in  alternative  time  systems. 

But  how  are  the  time  systems  of  different  observers, 
or  of  the  same  observer  under  different  conditions,  co- 
ordinated ?  Co-ordinated  they  undoubtedly  must  be  to  some 
extent,  for  our  common  experience  is  of  nature  as  an  entirety. 
This  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  questions  discussed 
in  the  two  books,  and  the  solution  is  highly  significant. 
If  the  question  were  put  to  a  metaphysician  he  might  have 
little  difficulty  in  answering  it.  He  might  reply  that 
thought  does  not  exist  in  separation  from  the  series  of 
objects  presented  in  space  and  time,  save  in  so  far  as  it 
is  described  in  a  distorted  form  from  standpoints,  such  as 
those  at  times  adopted  by  the  psychologist,  which  give 
only  a  relatively  true  account  of  it.  He  would  go  on  to 
say  that  in  such  cases  the  relativity  arose  from  the  assump- 
tion of  a  view  which  could  be  justifiably  adopted  only  for 
a  special  and  limited  purpose.  He  would  then  point  out, 
what  we  shall  have  to  discuss  in  detail  at  a  later  stage, 
that  the  character  of  our  thinking  implies  the  recognition 
of  actual  identity  in  difference.  Observers  might  thus  be 
recognising  a  nature  of  which  their  conceptual  knowledge 
was  identical  in  its  respective  differences,  so  that  we  all 
of  us  behold  the  sun,  moon,  and  stars  as  identically  the  same 
objects,  despite  differences  due  to  our  positions.  As  the 
distinction  between  the  concept  and  its  object  falls 
within  knowledge,  and  has  no  meaning  apart  from  or  out- 
side it,  he  would  not  be  troubled  by  the  problem  of  how 
thoughts  and  things  were  to  be  brought  into  one  in  the 
significance  of  experience. 

But  it  would  have  been  difficult  for  Professor  Whitehead 
to  take  such  a  line  in  his  discussion.  He  does  not 
pronounce  against  this  kind  of  objective  idealism,  which 
is  a  development  of  that  Kantian  interpretation  of  signi- 
ficance as  implied  in  experience  on  which  he  looks  with 
some  favour.  But  he  has  set  to  himself  the  task  of  en- 
deavouring to  explain  nature  on  the  provisional  footing  that 
it  is  closed  to  mind.  He  is  accordingly  as  consistent  as  he 
can  be,  and  he  is  a  thinker  with  but  few  illusions  as  to  the 
difficulties  he  finds  in  being  so.  His  standpoint  indeed 


POSITION  77 

implies  that  mind  is  in  the  main  something  that  looks  on 
nature  as  outside  it.  Even  his  "  percipient  event  "  has 
a  biological  appearance.  It  is  a  natural  further  step  to  look 
on  the  concepts  of  thought  as  distinct  from  the  reality 
about  which  they  are  concepts.  Thought  itself  may  place 
them  in  this  relation  quite  justly  for  special  purposes  of 
its  own.  It  often  does  so.  But  when  it  does  so  it  is  in 
virtue  of  distinctions  that  are  its  own  creatures.  From 
another  standpoint,  at  which  no  such  distinction  is  treated 
as  final,  the  universals  of  thought  are  present  in  the 
particular  object,  which  gets  its  reality  only  through  them, 
and  at  the  same  time  is  what  gives  these  universals  reality. 
This  seems  to  be  the  real  explanation  of  how  significance 
and  experience  can  mean  the  same  thing.  The  form  is 
of  the  character  to  which  metaphysicians  have  given  the 
name  of  the  "  concrete  universal,"  the  individuality  that 
is  as  much  general  as  it  is  particular,  and  in  which  these 
two  phases  if  distinguishable  are  so  only  in  reflection,  and 
not  as  separate  entities  in  the  real  about  which  we  reflect. 
Such  concrete  universals  are  intelligible  only  if  mind  and 
its  object  belong  to  one  entirety,  and  are  in  final  analysis 
inseverable. 

Now  the  necessity  of  recognising  some  such  principle 
as  this,  characterising  reality,  comes  to  light  in  Professor 
Whitehead's  explanation  of  Congruence.  If  there  are 
alternative  space  and  time  systems,  how  do  we  compare 
them  ?  Not  merely  by  measurement,  for  this,  as  a  matter 
of  fact,  presupposes  congruence.  A  yard  measured  in  one 
such  system  may  have  a  different  significance  from  a 
yard  measured  in  another.  If  we  are  to  compare  we 
must  be  certain  that  the  unit  signified  is  identical  in  the 
two  systems.  Einstein  has  made  this  very  clear,  as  we 
shall  see  later  on,  and  so  have  the  discrepancies  from 
Newtonian  calculations  which  astronomy  has  revealed, 
and  the  new  ideas  involved  in  the  solution  of  the  question 
as  to  why  the  velocity  of  light  always  appears  constant. 

Now  we  have  seen  how  Professor  Whitehead  has  suc- 
ceeded in  clearing  the  ground  to  a  certain  extent.  He  has 
found  an  explanation  of  how  points  and  lines  and  planes 
which  are  constructions  of  reflection  that  come  to  us,  not 
in  bare  sensation,  but  through  recognition,  arise  out  of  the 
inseparability  of  space  from  time,  so  that  all  space-time 
systems  in  which  these  emerge  present  conceptual  objects 

7 


78  RELATIVITY  IN  AN  ENGLISH  FORM 

so  far  identical  in  structure.  The  possibility  of  measure- 
ment remains  still  to  be  explained,  although  coincidence 
in  position  has  up  to  a  certain  point  been  accounted  for 
in  terms  that  apply  to  all  such  systems  equally.  Motion 
presupposes  rest  for  its  significance.  Now  rest  depends 
on  position.  It  does  not  follow  from  acceptance  of  the 
principle  of  relativity  that  there  is  no  position  which  is 
in  any  sense  at  all  absolute.  There  is  in  the  case  of  each 
time  system  a  meaning  in  which  we  can  attribute  some- 
thing resembling  an  absolute  position.  The  series  of 
instantaneous  spaces  in  the  moments  of  a  temporal  series, 
which  we  reach  by  abstraction  from  events,  and  regard 
as  parallel  because  such  moments  are  successive  and  so 
independent  as  regards  each  other,  may  define  positions 
as  being  absolute  within  the  systems  which  belong  to  that 
time  series.  Such  positions  may  be  those  of  event- 
particles  in  successive  spaces,  so  correlated  in  their  respec- 
tive sets  that  each  possesses  the  same  position  in  a  series 
of  spaces.  "  Such  a  set  of  event- particles  will  form  a 
point  in  the  timeless  space  of  that  time  system.  Thus  a 
point  is  really  an  absolute  position  in  the  timeless  space 
of  a  given  time  system."  Still,  there  are  alternative  time 
systems,  and  each  must  therefore  have  its  own  definition 
of  absolute  position.  If  we  take  one  of  these  time  systems 
and  consider  it  as  possessing  various  instantaneous  spaces, 
we  find  that  motion,  which  is  an  observed  fact,  is  mean- 
ingless if  we  think  of  it  as  confined  to  a  single  instan- 
taneous space.  It  expresses  the  comparison  between 
position  in  one  instantaneous  space  with  positions  in  other 
instantaneous  spaces  of  the  same  time  system.  Rest,  like 
motion,  is  an  observed  fact.  The  percipient  event  is 
"  here  "  and  its  duration  is  "  now."  The  relation  of  the 
percipient  event  to  its  duration  is  what  Professor  White- 
head  names  "  cogredience."  It  gives  the  sense  of  rest 
and  helps  the  integration  of  the  duration  into  a  prolonged 
present.  The  preservation  of  this  peculiar  relation  to  a 
duration  is  a  necessary  condition  for  the  function  of  that 
duration  as  a  present  duration  for  sense-awareness.  Co- 
gredience is  the  preservation  of  an  unbroken  quality  of 
standpoint  within  the  duration.  It  is  the  continuance 
of  identity  of  station  within  the  whole  of  nature  which 
has  its  terminus  in  our  sense-awareness.  Thus  perception 
is  always  "  here,"  and  a  duration  can  only  be  posited  as 


CONGRUENCE  79 

present  for  sense-awareness  on  condition  that  it  affords 
one  unbroken  meaning  of  "  here  "  in  its  relation  to  the 
percipient  event.  It  is  only  in  the  past  that  you  can  have 
been  "  there "  with  a  standpoint  distinct  from  your 
present  "  here."  The  percipient  event  determines  the 
time  system  immediately  present  in  nature.  As  the  per- 
cipient mind  in  its  passage  correlates  itself  with  the 
passage  of  the  percipient  event  into  another  percipient 
event,  the  time  system  correlated  with  the  percipience  of 
that  mind  will  change. 

Professor  Whitehead  deduces  from  these  principles  the 
meaning  of  perpendicularity  in  space.  It  arises  from  the 
intersection  of  the  moments  of  different  time  systems 
possessing  their  respective  instantaneous  spaces.  The 
directions  will  be  different,  and  the  levels  in  the  two 
spaces  will  therefore  intersect.  The  symmetry  of  per- 
pendicularity is  a  particular  case  of  the  symmetry  of  the 
mutual  relations  between  the  two  time  systems.  It 
stands  for  a  unique  and  definite  property  in  nature.  But 
still  cogredience  has  not  as  yet  brought  us  as  far  as  con- 
gruence, and  an  adequate  explanation  of  congruence  is 
essential  if  comparison  and  measurement  in  space  and 
time  are  to  be  rendered  intelligible.  Cogredience  explains 
perpendicularity,  and,  when  taken  in  conjunction  with 
the  reciprocal  symmetry  between  the  relations  of  any  two 
time  systems,  congruence  results  from  the  conjunction. 
The  constructions  of  science  are  merely  expositions  of  the 
characters  of  things  perceived.  To  understand  the  nature 
of  congruence  we  turn  to  what  we  have  already  found  in 
the  fact  of  motion.  Motion  expresses  a  possible  connec- 
tion between  spatial  and  temporal  congruence.  An  event- 
particle,  to  take  an  elemental  case,  has  its  position  defined 
by  the  aggregate  of  moments  (no  two  of  the  same  family) 
in  which  it  lies.  It  receives  its  position  in  the  space  of 
one  moment  in  virtue  of  intersections  from  the  whole 
aggregate  of  other  moments  in  which  it  also  lies.  The 
differentiation  of  the  space  of  the  first  moment  into  a 
geometry  comparable  with  those  of  the  other  instantaneous 
points  occupied  by  the  event-particle  expresses  the  intersec- 
tions with  the  spaces  of  the  other  time  systems.  In  this  way 
planes  and  straight  lines  and  points  find  their  meaning,  and 
are  capable  of  comparison  through  recognition.  On  the 
other  hand,  parallelism  and  correspondence  arise  from  the 


80  RELATIVITY   IN  AN   ENGLISH  FORM 

parallelism  of  the  non-intersecting  successive  moments  of 
the  same  time  system  with  the  abstractively  reached 
contents  of  the  first  moment.  Similarly,  the  order  of 
parallel  planes  and  of  event-particles  on  straight  lines 
arises  from  the  time-order  of  intersecting  moments.  These 
are  the  sources  from  which  geometry  derives  its  physical 
explanation.  If  Professor  Whitehead  is  right,  he  has 
given  an  answer  to  a  question  put  by  Riemann  long  ago 
to  which  I  shall  refer  in  a  later  chapter. 

The  qualities  which  all  space  and  time  systems  must 
exhibit  in  common,  however  different  may  be  the  results, 
due  to  the  position  of  the  observer,  of  measurements  made 
in  them  are  thus  the  basis  of  congruence  according  to  the 
doctrine  explained  in  the  two  volumes.  It  is  this  identity 
in  the  principles  of  the  fundamental  structure  of  these 
systems  that  enables  the  measurements  made  in  them  to 
be  compared,  and  that  is  the  basis  of  their  congruence. 
Students  of  the  mathematical  theory  of  relativity  in  its 
earlier  or  "  special  "  form  will  be  reminded  of  the  way  in 
which  Einstein  applies  the  Lorentzian  formula  for  trans- 
formation. The  spatial  and  temporal  co-ordinates  of  a 
system  in  motion  in  a  straight  line  towards  a  source  of 
light  are  rendered  by  this  formula  comparable  with  the 
co-ordinates  of  another  system  which  is  treated  as  at  rest. 
The  illustration  is  a  merely  particular  case  falling  under  a 
much  wider  principle,  and  it  is  an  easy  case  to  follow 
because  the  equations  compared  have  a  common  constant 
of  a  very  simple  kind,  that  of  the  velocity  of  light.  But 
a  broader  principle  is  required  on  which  measurement  in 
one  space-time  system  can  be  translated  into  the  terms  of 
measurement  in  another  different  from  it,  if  we  are  to  find 
the  foundation  on  which  is  built  up  the  system  applied  in 
a  complicated  fashion  in  the  transformations  used  in  the 
general  theory  of  relativity,  and  this  principle  appears  to  be 
just  that  with  which  Professor  Whitehead  is  here  dealing. 

I  feel  that  in  the  brief  references  to  his  work  now  made, 
I  have  not  done  more  than  offer  an  indication  of  Professor 
Whitehead's  elaborate  and  searching  analysis  of  con- 
gruence, and  I  must  refer  the  reader  who  desires  to  explore 
it  further  to  his  two  books,  with  the  hope  that  in  what  I 
have  written  I  have  not  done  much  injustice  to  the 
character  of  his  exposition. 

What  I  am  concerned,  however,  to  add  is  that,  gallant 


PROFESSOR  WHITEHEAD'S  WORK  81 

as  is  his  attempt,  the  author  of  the  Concept  of  Nature  can 
hardly  claim  to  have  successfully  excluded  nature  from 
the  imputation  of  the  ingression  of  mind  into  its  constitu- 
tion. Congruence,  for  example,  like  much  else  in  his 
system,  is  the  creature  of  the  recognition  of  objects,  and 
such  recognition  appears  to  me  to  be  meaningless  excepting 
as  itself  the  pure  creature  of  mind.  In  a  later  chapter  I 
shall  have  to  come  to  grips  with  the  New  Realists  over  this 
point.  It  is  not  necessary  to  go  so  far  as  a  distinguished 
writer  on  relativity,  Professor  Eddington,  seems  to  do  in 
order  to  make  good  the  point  that  mind  and  the  object- 
world,  as  interpreted  by  the  doctrine  of  relativity,  are 
inseparable.  The  facts  to  which  he  draws  attention  in 
this  connection  are  remarkable,  but  they  do  not  appear 
to  imply  of  necessity  the  principle  of  representative 
perception  which  I  think  he  imports  into  them. 

Professor  Whitehead,  abjuring  metaphysics,  has  sought 
to  keep  on  the  other  side  of  the  line.  I  doubt  whether  he 
has  succeeded.  But  he  has  at  least  accomplished  this, 
lie  has  shown  that  philosophy  cannot  hope  to  make 
progress  without  taking  full  account  of  such  an  analysis 
of  the  object- world  of  reality  as  only  scientific  methods 
like  his  can  make  possible.  His  logical  investigation  is 
an  entirely  fresh  one,  and,  whatever  the  light  which  it  has 
cast  on  the  ultimate  character  of  reality,  it  has  at  all  events 
opened  up  a  new  region  with  which  the  inquirers  of  the 
future  will  have  to  make  themselves  familiar.  Only  one 
equipped  as  is  Professor  Whitehead  with  both  mathe- 
matical and  logical  science  of  the  highest  order  could  have 
explored  hitherto  unfamiliar  ground  with  the  originality 
and  the  thoroughness  which  he  has  shown  to  us. 


CHAPTER    V 

EINSTEIN 

I  NOW  turn  to  the  doctrine  of  relativity  in  measurement 
in  the  form  given  to  it  by  the  school  of  Einstein.  My 
endeavour  will  be  to  bring  out  the  connection  of  the 
doctrine  in  this  shape  with  the  wider  meaning  of  the 
principle  which  lies  beyond  mathematical  and  physical 
science.  In  the  first  place  it  is  necessary  to  enter  on 
some  explanation  of  this  doctrine  as  applied  by  Einstein 
to  the  forms  of  space  and  time. 

Long  before  1905  it  had  been  found  by  experiment  that 
the  velocity  of  light  appeared  to  be  always  186,330  miles 
per  second,  whether  the  passage  of  its  rays  was  towards 
us  while  we  were  at  rest  with  regard  to  its  source  or 
whether  we  were  ourselves  moving  towards  that  source. 
In  the  latter  case  the  true  velocity  of  approach  between 
the  observer  and  the  rays  must,  according  to  logic,  have 
been  really  greater  than  in  the  first  case,  for  just  the 
same  reason  that  the  combined  velocity  of  two  trains 
coming  towards  each  other  is  greater  than  that  of  either 
singly.  But  the  combined  velocities  in  the  instance  of 
light  appeared  after  most  careful  observation  not  to 
conform  to  this  calculation,  and  in  consequence  certain 
physicists,  assuming  the  aether  to  be  an  actual  and  inde- 
pendently existing  substance  in  which  the  waves  of  light 
travelled,  had  resorted  for  an  explanation  to  the  idea 
that  all  bodies  which  were  in  motion  towards  the  source 
of  the  waves  in  the  aether  underwent,  from  some  action 
on  them  of  that  aether,  a  contraction  in  length  in  the 
direction  of  their  motion.  This  would  have  accounted 
for  the  apparent  constancy  in  the  velocity  of  light,  for  the 
contraction  would  have  extended  not  only  to  the  other 
elements  in  the  moving  system  of  the  observer,  but  to  the 
rods  and  clocks  by  which  space  and  time  were  measured  from 
this  system.  These  would  have  measured  in  contracted 

82 


THE   SPECIAL  THEORY  83 

units.  However,  the  supposition  was  unsatisfactory  in 
that  there  was  no  vestige  of  direct  evidence  to  support 
the  hypothesis  of  such  a  contraction. 

In  1905  Einstein  introduced  a  wholly  different  explana- 
tion of  the  fact  that  the  velocity  of  light  appeared  to  be 
the  same,  whether  the  observer  was  at  rest  or  was 
moving  with  a  velocity  of  his  own  towards  the  source 
of  the  rays.  His  explanation  was  that  the  system  of 
measurement  was  demonstrably  relative  to  the  motion 
or  rest  of  the  observer,  and  that  this  relativity  had  been 
overlooked.  He  pointed  out  the  assumption,  tacitly  made, 
that  the  aether  was  an  independent  physical  substance,  the 
standards  of  relations  in  which  therefore  never  varied,  and 
declared  that  such  an  assumption  was  unwarranted.  No 
system  of  measurement  and  no  employment  of  co-ordinates 
as  necessarily  of  an  absolute  and  unvarying  meaning 
could  legitimately  be  based  on  it.  For  when  we  observe 
motion  we  observe  in  reality  only  the  relations  of  things 
as  altering  their  positions  in  reference  to  each  other — that 
of  our  own  situation,  for  example,  to  a  source  of  light.  If, 
he  said,  we  bear  this  fact  in  mind  the  consequence  is  clear. 
The  basis  of  measurement  and  the  appearance  of  reality 
depending  on  it,  and  therefore  the  outcome,  and  the  signifi- 
cance of  the  units  employed,  must  vary  with  any  change  in 
situation  of  the  observer.  To  look  at  a  body  moving  on  the 
face  of  our  earth  is  a  simple  matter.  For  ordinary  practical 
purposes  our  changes  of  position  on  the  earth  are  not 
of  a  velocity  great  enough  appreciably  to  affect  measure- 
ment, and  its  basis  does  not  materially  vary  in  observa- 
tion of  objects  on  the  earth.  But  suppose  that,  instead 
of  observing  objects  on  the  earth,  we  are  observing  a 
distant  star  as  a  source  of  light.  In  this  case  the  observer 
may  be  moving  with  great  velocity  relatively  to  the  star. 
To  understand  Einstein's  principle  as  it  applies  in  such 
a  case,  it  is  necessary  to  get  out  of  our  heads  the  per- 
sistent assumption  that  when  we  look  out  on  the  universe 
of  space  and  time  we  are  looking  at  something  which 
is  self-subsistent.  For  him  spatial  and  temporal  relations 
in  that  universe  depend  on  the  situations  and  conditions 
of  observers.  The  character  of  space  and  time  is  there- 
fore purely  relative,  and  so  is  their  reality. 

If  one  observer  is  approaching  the  object  observed  with 
a  great  velocity,  while  in  regard  to  that  object  the  other 


84  EINSTEIN 

observer  is  at  rest,  then,  if  Einstein  be  right,  what  is 
experienced  in  his  observation  by  the  first  observer  will 
be  actually  different  from  what  is  experienced  in  his 
observation  by  the  second.  For,  in  order  that  the  velocity 
of  light  should  have  remained  the  same  for  both,  the  units 
defining  what  is  observed,  as  employed  by  them  respec- 
tively, must  have  been  different.  What  gives  rise  to 
the  difference  is  that,  as  we  saw  in  the  preceding  chapter, 
space  and  time  do  not  exist  separately  from  each  other, 
excepting  so  far  as  we  abstract  and  separate  them  notion- 
ally  in  measuring  change  or  movement.  This  we  do  by 
employing  for  the  purpose  of  such  measurement  co- 
ordinates or  axes  of  reference  which  must  be  applicable  as 
regards  both  space  and  time.  Now  our  observers  are  in 
motion  relatively  to  each  other.  This  logically  involves 
that,  as  each  obtains  the  same  result  in  his  measurement 
of  the  velocity  of  light,  the  co-ordinates  with  reference  to 
which  they  have  resolved  the  union  of  space  and  time 
have  been  different.  The  proportions  between  the  co- 
ordinates used  by  the  observers  in  each  case  may  be 
expressed  mathematically  in  sets  of  equations.  In  each 
case  the  unit  of  the  combination  of  space  with  time  is 
apparently  the  same,  but  not  the  less,  on  resolution  into 
derivative  aspects,  these  aspects  are  found  to  exist  in 
different  proportions.  This  explains  why,  notwithstanding 
the  relative  rest  and  motion  of  two  observers,  the  motion 
of  one  of  them  having  to  be  added  on  in  estimating  the 
relative  speed  of  the  approaching  rays,  the  velocity  of 
light  remains  the  same  for  both. 

At  the  risk  of  repetition  it  may  be  well  to  state  more 
fully  why,  according  to  what  is  called  the  special  or  re- 
stricted principle  of  relativity  as  originally  formulated  by 
Einstein,  the  velocity  of  light  comes  out  as  a  constant,  or  is 
the  same  for  all  persons  observing  its  approach  irrespective 
of  whether  they  are  in  motion  or  stationary,  provided  that 
in  the  case  of  a  moving  observer  his  rate  of  motion  does  not 
vary  and  his  course  is  a  straight  one. 

That  this  ought  not  to  be  so  is  suggested  by  the  analogy 
of  two  railway  trains  approaching  each  other.  For  the 
velocity  of  each  train  must  be  added  in  if  we  are  to  find 
the  actual  rate  of  approach.  It  seems  accordingly  that 
the  velocity  of  an  observer  moving  towards  a  distant 
source  of  light  must  similarly  appear  in  the  result  of  calcu- 


THE   METHOD   WHEN  WE  MEASURE  85 

lation.  But  the  analogy  of  the  trains  is  in  reality  only  of 
limited  application.  In  our  every-day  life  on  the  earth 
we  may  justifiably  for  practical  purposes  assume  that  we 
are  all  relatively  at  rest  when  we  observe,  and  that  the  con- 
ditions under  which  we  measure  are  therefore  always  the 
same.  This  assumption  is,  however,  wholly  unjustifiable 
when  we  are  observing  a  star,  for  we  may  in  fact  be  moving 
either  towards  or  from  it  with  great  rapidity,  and  we  can- 
not take  the  observer  to  be  otherwise  situated  than  in  a 
system  which  is  changing  its  position  relatively  to  the  star 
at  a  high  speed.  The  conditions  under  which  such  an 
observer  measures  are  therefore  quite  different  from  those 
assumed  for  practical  purposes  to  obtain  in  the  case  of  the 
observer  of  the  trains.  His  motion  and  continuous  altera- 
tion of  relative  situation  make  all  the  difference  in  the  prin- 
ciple which  gives  meaning  to  measurements  that  have  to 
adjust  themselves  to  changing  standards. 

To  see  the  logical  consequences  of  this  we  must  retrace 
the  steps  which  the  analogy  of  the  train  made  us  take,  and 
ask  ourselves  whether  it  was  safe  in  our  astronomical 
observation  to  assume  that  space  and  time,  with  units 
calculated  in  them  such  as  miles  and  seconds,  can  have  a 
reality  which  is  not  dependent  on  some  fashioning  in  the 
process  of  observation  which  may  have  caused  their  reality 
to  vary  in  its  character.  Are  there  in  truth  any  relations 
in  space  and  time  between  objects  which  ought  to  be  looked 
on  as  furnishing  the  foundation  of  absolute  measures  and 
shapes  ?  Are  there  any  such  measures  and  shapes  which 
can  be  taken  to  be  under  all  conditions  primary  and  funda- 
mental, as  Newton  assumed  ?  Or  are  these  all  relative  to 
the  situation  and  conditions  of  the  observer  ? 

It  may  be  that  before  we  reach  the  forms  and  measure- 
ments in  which  objects  appear  to  us  we  have  started  from 
some  basic  fact  which  is  independent  of  them  and  on  which 
we  have  built  them  up  by  interpretation.  It  is  possible 
that  relations  in  space  and  time  are  merely  the  outcome  of 
intellectual  construction  ;  in  other  words  are  relations  in 
which  the  observer  in  his  effort  after  discovery  has  to  set 
this  basic  fact  in  its  reference  to  himself,  so  that  both  the 
significance  and  the  reality  of  the  relations  depend  on  such 
reference  to  the  observer,  and  have  to  vary  according  as 
he  observes  from  a  system  which  is  in  motion  of  some  kind 
or  from  one  which  is  at  rest.  He  may  have  fashioned  his 


86  EINSTEIN 

measurements  differently  according  to  the  co-ordinates 
or  standards  of  reference  which  he  has  had  to  employ  in 
making  them. 

Now  it  is  far  from  clear  that  Newton  was  justified  in 
assuming  an  absolute  character  in  motion  as  something 
which  we  apprehend  directly.  If  I  step  across  a  railway 
compartment  I  may  be  moving  relatively  to  the  train  at 
only  a  very  minute  fraction  of  a  mile  in  a  minute.  But 
individually  I  may  be  moving  for  an  observer  on  the  plat- 
form of  the  station  the  train  is  passing  at  sixty  miles  an 
hour  plus  this  small  fraction.  The  relativity  in  standard 
does  not,  moreover,  end  there.  For  the  combined  velocities 
of  the  train  and  myself  have  to  be  added  to  the  great 
velocity  (possibly  over  eighteen  miles  a  second)  with  which 
the  earth  and  the  train  on  it  are  passing  relatively  to  positions 
in  the  sun.  Again,  the  solar  system  may  itself  be  moving 
in  the  firmament,  and  so  on  ad  infinitum.  The  velocity 
can  never  in  short  be  expressed  as  an  absolute  one,  or  other- 
wise than  as  relative  to  some  system  apart,  which  again  is 
presumably  itself  in  movement  relatively  to  some  yet  other 
systems  beyond.  We  are  not  justified  in  the  assumption 
that  there  is  any  self-contained  or  absolute  velocity  in 
nature  to  measure.  Why,  then,  should  the  units  in  which 
we  render  for  ourselves  either  the  velocity  of  the  trains  or 
that  of  light  have  been  taken  as  meaning  what  they  did 
otherwise  than  merely  relatively  to  the  situation  of  the 
observer  and  its  rest  or  motion  ?  Nothing  further  appears 
to  have  been  really  imported  in  the  miles  and  seconds  in 
which  the  velocity  is  estimated  under  conditions  which 
differ  or  in  the  reality  we  attribute  to  them.  My  rate  of 
transit  in  crossing  the  railway  carriage  was  expressed  in 
terms  which  were  only  final  in  the  train,  and  the  earth  and 
the  sun  in  addition  were  assumed  to  be  at  rest.  It  is  plain 
that  scientifically  this  assumption  ought  not  to  have  been 
treated  as  being  absolutely  true.  The  same  thing  occurs 
when  I  approach  the  source  of  the  ray  of  light  coming 
towards  me.  The  significance  of  the  directly  apprehended 
fact,  which  is  the  change  in  position  relative  to  myself,  and 
is  called  velocity,  has  to  be  estimated,  and  this  I  do  by  finding 
analytically  how  space  and  time,  miles  and  seconds,  are 
related  in  it.  That  is  how  velocities  are  really  measured 
and  compared.  They  are  always  calculated  in  terms  of 
the  particular  co-ordinates  employed  and  are  relative  to 


UNIFORMITY   IN   RESULT  THE  OUTCOME       87 

these.     For  observers  who  are  all  in  the  same  state  of  rest 
or  motion  the  results  will  be  uniform,  for  the  co-ordinates 
will  have  been  the  same.     But  if  the  position  of  the  observer 
is  a  changing  one  the  velocity,  which  is  measured  only  as 
relative  to  his  position,  changes  also  as  he  measures  it. 
Our  direct  and  primary  experience  is  simply  the  bare  fact 
of  the  change  in  position  itself,  that  of  the  ray  with  a  move- 
ment relatively  to  ourselves  increased  by  our  own  velocity 
if  we  are  going  towards  the  distant  star.     This  bare  fact  of 
observation  does  not  by  itself  present  miles  and  seconds  as 
units  in  which  we  express  it.     We  have  to  estimate  the 
significance  of  the  immediate  presentation  of  the  changing 
position  of  the  light  waves  as  they  advance  towards  us 
and  we  towards  them.     This  we  do  by  estimating  relatively 
to  the  standards  of  reference  we  adopt  as  our  co-ordinates, 
representing   hypothetically   assumed   lines   we   select  as 
appropriate,  in  terms  of  which  we  measure  the  results  of 
our  observation.     One  of  these  co-ordinates  is  chosen  so  as 
to  yield  us  a  measurement  of  length,  another  gives  a  spatial- 
ised  representation  of  the  duration  occupied.     The  propor- 
tion in  which  the  measurements  which  result  from  their 
use  appears,  when  we  estimate  velocity  by  relating  space 
to  time,  both  thus  represented,  gives  us  our  measure  of  the 
velocity.     Now  if  the  different  observers  are  themselves 
changing   position   relatively   to   each   other  the   results 
obtained  in  this  way  must  vary  proportionately.     These 
results  are  analysed  in  terms  of  co-ordinates  which  them- 
selves vary  with  changes  in  the  situation  of  the  observer 
in  reference  to  what  he  observes,  importing   it  may  be 
more  length  traversed  in  the  second,  or  the  same  length 
in  a  second   that   really  comes  out  shorter.     What  the 
observers  have  taken  their  respective  measuring-rods  and 
stop-watches  to  indicate,  however  these  may  resemble, 
will  thus  be  facts  with  different  meanings.     The  units 
of  velocity  will  have  been  got  at  in  the  same  way,  but  they 
will  in  point  of  fact  be  different  in  their  significance  and 
therefore  in  the  character  of  their  reality,  for  the  space  and 
time  relations  thus  reached  by  abstraction  and  inference 
will  have  been  constructed  in  the  process  of  observation 
and  combined  in  varying  proportions.     As  there  is  no 
absolute   space   or   time,    but   the   relations   which   give 
measurement  and  meaning  to  both  are  always  relative 
to  changing  standards,  the  apparent  velocity  will  remain  a 


88  EINSTEIN 

constant,  an  unvarying  fact  apparently  basic  in  our  aware- 
ness, but  it  will  really  have  been  differently  estimated  in 
the  measurements  we  make.  It  is  therefore  clear  that  to 
get  at  the  truth  we  ought  to  have  taken  first,  not  the  idea 
of  measurement  in  space  or  time  assumed  to  exist  independ- 
ently of  us,  for  these  consist  in  relations  which  are  merely 
derivative  and  dependent  for  their  reality  as  well  as  our 
observations  of  them  on  how  the  observer  has  resolved  the 
antecedent  and  original  fact  of  the  changing  position  of 
the  light  ray  relatively  to  himself,  but  the  actually  primary 
fact  of  his  awareness  of  the  change  in  a  mere  manifold  or 
continuum  before  it  was  in  any  way  measured. 

It  appears  mathematically,  when  we  write  out  the  proper 
equations,  that  the  variation  in  the  results  of  the  measure- 
ment thus  obtained  takes  place  automatically  as  the 
outcome  of  the  special  principle  of  relativity.  The  result 
in  the  familiar  nominal  units  called  miles  and  seconds  is 
always  the  same,  but  it  has  been  necessarily  made  the  same 
by  the  application  at  the  starting-point  of  standards  or  co- 
ordinates of  measurement  which  altered  proportionately 
as  the  relative  situation  and  conditions  of  the  observer 
varied.  Our  measurement  has  therefore  changed  propor- 
tionately not  only  the  significance  of  these  units  but  their 
reality  for  us,  and  the  constancy  of  the  velocity  of  light  is 
disclosed  not  as  an  antecedent  to  the  process  but  as  a 
consequence  of  the  character  of  that  process. 

The  mathematical  equations  which  express  the  process 
itself,  together  with  the  methods  of  adjustment  so  that  the 
meanings  of  the  results  may  be  reduced  to  a  common 
standard,  are  called  the  Lorentzian  equations  of  transfor- 
mation. The  curious  will  find  these  equations  stated  and 
explained  in  a  way  that  may  now  be  more  readily  intel- 
ligible to  anyone  who  will  take  a  little  trouble,  in  Section 
XI  and  the  First  Appendix  in  the  English  translation  of 
Einstein's  book  on  the  Theory  of  Relativity. 

The  basis  of  our  measurement  is  thus  an  ever-changing 
one.  And  when  we  measure  the  distances  relative  to  our 
earth  as  moving,  our  clocks  and  measuring-rods,  although 
they  may  be  so  constructed  as  to  appear  to  register  in  terms 
outwardly  the  same,  do  not  record  in  these  terms  the  same 
actual  result.  For  space,  and  time  also  for  that  matter,  are 
not  fixed  entities,  but  signify  only  relations  between  objects. 
There  is  no  justification  for  the  assumption  of  absolute 


RELATIVITY  IN  MEASUREMENTS  89 

motion  or  absolute  rest.  Length  and  the  correspondence 
which  we  call  simultaneity,  meaning  thereby  that  the  times 
recorded  as  those  of  the  happening  of  two  events  at  two 
positions  are  recorded  as  identical,  turn  out  to  be  relative 
conceptions,  depending  on  the  real  situations  of  our 
standards  of  measurement.  Two  events  which  appear  to  be 
of  equal  duration  according  to  measurement  within  one 
system  may  occupy  different  times  when  measured  within 
another  system.  Thus,  space  and  time  being  really  inter- 
dependent, the  hypothesis  of  a  contraction  in  the  measuring 
rods  and  clocks  is  superseded  as  quite  unnecessary.  That 
which  appears  is  merely  the  result  of  the  relativity  of 
our  method  of  measuring  lengths  and  times.  Even 
coincidence,  in  the  form  of  simultaneity  or  correspondence 
as  ascertained  in  measurement  of  time  by  clocks,  may 
be  only  apparent.  For  its  appearance  in  the  end 
depends  on  what  may  be  measurements  in  different  space- 
time  systems,  that  is  on  the  spatial  standards  of  reference 
afforded  by  the  dials  of  the  particular  clocks,  and  these 
may  imply  what  are  really  different  units.  Space  systems 
and  time  systems  thus  alike  depend  for  the  standards 
that  make  them  on  the  situation  of  the  observer 
relatively  to  what  he  observes,  and  on  whether  he  is  at 
rest  or  moving.  Two  systems  at  a  distance  from  each 
other,  moving  in  different  directions  and  with  different 
velocities,  may,  for  observers  in  them  of  a  common  object, 
be  productive  of  results  signifying  different  truths,  in  the 
form  of  shapes  and  measurements  of  space  and  time  as 
actually  and  correctly  observed.  Of  course  the  observers 
are  assumed  to  be  observing  separately  and  in  self-contained 
systems,  without  any  reference  to  each  other.  Even  on 
the  earth  we  find  illustrations  of  this  kind  of  relativity. 
From  the  railway  line  a  train  appears  to  be  moving ;  from 
the  train  the  line  appears  to  be  so.  The  presentation  of 
what  happens  from  a  system  of  reference  moving  with  the 
train  is  different  from  that  yielded  by  a  system  of  reference 
on  the  line.  What  tells  us  that  in  this  case  the  only  reliable 
observation  must  be  observation  from  the  line  itself,  is 
that  the  picture  framed  from  the  train  will  not  fit  into  the 
context  of  either  the  general  experience  of  our  fellow-men 
on  the  earth  or  our  own  usual  experience.  It  is  this 
discrepancy  from  our  conventional  standards,  and  not 
any  absolute  perception  of  space  and  time  as  subsisting 


90  EINSTEIN 

by  themselves,  that  shows  us  that  our  passing  system  of 
reference  is  in  such  an  instance  unsuitable  for  getting  at 
the  way  in  which  things  will  present  themselves  under 
conditions  more  in  harmony  with  our  lives  than  those 
of  an  obviously  transitory  experience.  But  in  other  cases, 
such  as  that  of  an  observer  on  Mars,  no  such  context 
of  general  experience  may  exist,  and  in  such  cases  the 
estimate  under  one  set  of  conditions  of  reference  has  to 
be  accepted  as  giving  truth  and  reality  not  less  actual  than 
what  is  yielded  by  observation  from  a  different  system. 

To  illustrate  this  more  plainly  I  will  take  an  instance 
where  there  is  no  reason  for  preferring  one  set  of  co- 
ordinates of  reference  to  a  rival  system.  I  adapt  the 
substance  of  this  illustration  from  Professor  Eddington's 
brilliant  book  on  Space,  Time  and  Gravitation.  Big  Ben 
strikes  one  and,  an  hour  later,  two.  For  me,  sitting  hard 
by  in  Queen  Anne's  Gate,  the  strokes  appear  to  occur  at 
the  same  place,  and  to  be  separated  by  an  hour.  This 
agrees,  too,  with  what  my  own  watch  says.  But  an 
observer  situated  on  the  sun  would  consider  that  the 
strokes  had  occurred  at  different  situations  in  space  of 
Big  Ben,  for  he  would  have  seen  that  the  earth  had  moved 
in  the  hour  about  70,000  miles  along  its  orbital  track  with 
respect  to  the  sun,  from  which  he  was  observing.  In 
resolving  the  result  of  his  observation  into  the  space 
component  of  the  position,  he  thus  resolves  it  with  a 
different  result  from  mine,  for  whom,  Big  Ben  being  at 
rest  for  me,  the  space  change  is  nil.  If  he  resolves  the 
space  by  a  different  standard  of  reference,  he  has  also  to 
resolve  the  time  component  differently,  for  space  and 
time,  as  we  have  seen,  involve  each  other.  The  watch  of 
the  observer  on  the  sun  may  be  constructed  on  the  same 
principles  as  my  own,  but  the  measurement  of  time  by 
the  units  marked  on  the  watch  on  the  sun,  though  appar- 
ently analogous,  will  have  a  different  meaning.  Its 
apparent  agreement  with  mine  will  not  be  real,  for  the 
spaces  on  its  dial,  to  which  reference  has  to  be  made  for 
measurement  in  looking  for  the  simultaneities  belonging 
to  correspondence  in  time  as  indicated  on  the  dial  spaces, 
will  not  be  in  reality  corresponding  spaces,  the  measure- 
ment being  made  on  a  different  basis  of  reference.  There 
will  thus  be  two  different  local  time  systems,  just  as  there 
are  two  different  local  space  systems,  and  the  observer  in 


SPATIALISED  TIME  91 

each  will  measure  with  reference  only  to  the  co-ordinates 
of  his  own  system. 

That  the  time  measurements  of  the  observer  on  the  sun 
should  vary  with  his  space -system  is  not  surprising.  For 
apart  from  the  view  of  time  and  space  as  differently 
fashioned  abstractions  from  a  time-space  continuum  in 
which  they  have  grown  from  a  common  root,  and 
also  apart  from  other  difficulties,  mathematical  and 
physical,  in  the  process  of  their  dissociation,  there  is  a  more 
general  way  of  expressing  the  reason.  Those  who  have 
studied  Bergson  will  remember  his  principle  that  the  time 
we  observe  is  always  spatialised  time,  and  has  a  distinctive 
character  as  such  for  the  observer  who  seeks  to  make  it 
an  object  of  scientific  experience.  It  is  this  spatialisation 
of  time  that  gives  to  coincidence  and  correspondence  in 
time  their  measurements.  We  measure  time  by  treating 
it  as  in  relation  to  space,  and  it  is  only  in  terms  of  space 
that  we  can  measure  it.  With  pure  duration  measurement 
has,  in  Bergson's  exposition,  nothing  whatever  to  do. 
The  measurement  of  calculated  time  must  therefore  vary 
with  the  character  of  each  particular  space  system. 

Thus  the  position  of  the  observer  and  what  he  observes 
turn  out  to  imply  each  indissolubly,  and  the  theory  of 
relativity,  even  in  the  limited  form  in  which  Einstein 
introduced  it  in  1905,  does  away  with  the  traditional  con- 
ception of  unaltering  relations  in  space  and  time  which 
was  accepted  by  Newton,  and  banishes  the  notion  of 
the  aether  as  a  self-subsisting  substance  with  a  unique  set 
of  co-ordinates  to  which  all  general  laws  are  finally  refer- 
able. No  such  unique  or  final  system,  if  its  implications 
are  thought  out,  is  either  reconcilable  with  the  apparently 
constant  character  of  the  velocity  of  light,  or  is  on  Einstein's 
principle  possible. 

On  the  principles  laid  down  by  Newton  the  co-ordinates 
by  reference  to  which  observers  with  different  situations 
and  movements  estimate  could  not  have  been  really 
equivalent.  That  the  velocity  of  light  should  appear  to  be 
under  all  circumstances  the  same  for  all  systems,  whether 
they  moved  or  were  at  rest  towards  the  source  of  its  rays, 
was  the  demonstration  of  this.  That  velocity  could  not 
truly  be  the  same  if  the  velocity  were  absolute  in  an  inde- 
pendent space  and  time.  But,  if  its  estimation  depended 
on  measurements  made  in  space  and  time  systems 


92  EINSTEIN 

which  varied  in  the  significance  of  their  units  with  the 
position  and  movement  of  the  observer,  then  the  con- 
stancy of  the  measured  velocity  of  light  would  be  the 
outcome  of  the  self-adjusting  nature  of  the  standards  by 
reference  to  which  it  was  measured.  On  this  footing  light 
signals  could  not  any  longer  be  regarded  as  depending  for 
their  coincidences  merely  on  the  condition  of  an  indepen- 
dently existing  substance  in  which  they  were  propagated, 
because  such  a  substance  would  in  that  case  be  at  rest 
for  all  systems,  and  the  facts  would  consequently  be 
inexplicable.  In  the  same  way  the  electro-magnetic  field, 
which  extends  indefinitely  into  space,  could,  as  a  conse- 
quence of  what  research  and  experiment  had  disclosed, 
be  no  independent  "  carrier." 

Ten  years  later,  in  1915,  Einstein  made  known  to  the 
world  that  more  general  theory  of  relativity  which  is  now 
associated  with  his  name.  His  first  view  was  not  thrown 
over,  but  had  become  a  special  case  of  a  wider  principle 
which  claimed  to  get  rid  of  much  that  had  perplexed 
observers.  The  first  theory  had  indeed  obviated  the 
resort  to  the  notion  of  a  physical  contraction  in  our 
measuring  instruments.  The  apparent  contraction  was  no 
longer  taken  to  be  a  physical  shortening  of  the  instrument. 
It  had  been  shown  to  be  the  natural  consequence  of  the 
complete  relativity  of  measurement,  and  to  be  the  out- 
come of  changes  in  the  position  of  the  observer  with  his 
co-ordinates  or  standards.  But  the  scope  of  the  doctrine 
of  1905  had  been  restricted  to  what  was  found  by  com- 
paring movements  rectilinear  in  direction  and  constant 
in  proportional  velocity.  If  the  systems  compared  do  not 
move  in  this  fashion  account  must  be  taken  of  further 
phenomena.  This  is  a  consequence  of  the  full  principle 
of  relativity,  as  developing  the  original  principle  of  1905, 
with  the  complete  treatment  of  space  and  time  as  merely 
varying  relations  generalised  from  the  positions  and  move- 
ments of  objects. 

These  considerations  led  Einstein  to  insist  in  1915  on 
the  broad  principle  that  the  motion  of  all  bodies  is  nothing 
more  than  their  apparent  change  in  situation  relatively 
to  one  another.  The  objects  which  constitute  our  universe 
will  present  appearances  which  differ  in  every  case  accord- 
ing to  the  situation  and  kind  of  motion  of  the  observers 
with  their  measuring  systems.  These  appearances  are  the 


GRAVITATION  AND   INERTIA  93 

actual  reality.  Absolute  position,  shape,  and  measurement 
are  all  unmeaning.  Space  and  time  disappear  as  self- 
subsistent,  and  in  their  place  we  get  a  plurality  of  relative 
systems. 

We  now  come  to  a  fresh  outlook  made  possible  by  the 
general  principle  of  relativity.  We  have  seen  how  the 
notion  of  force  had  lost  meaning  for  modern  physicists. 
But  there  was  one  kind  of  motion  which  was  apparently 
explicable  only  as  the  manifestation  of  something  in  the 
nature  of  actual  pull.  In  gravitation  we  seem  to  observe 
a  case  in  which  bodies  genuinely  attract  each  other. 
What  is  called  inertia,  the  fact  that  a  body  remains  at  rest 
or  else  goes  on  in  the  path  in  which  it  is  moving  in  continua- 
tion of  its  actual  motion,  does  not  imply  this  sort  of 
explanation.  But  there  is  a  feature,  and  a  very  important 
one,  which  gravitational  and  inertial  force  exhibit  in 
common  ;  they  vary  with  the  mass  of  the  body  that  moves. 
The  two  so-called  forces  are  so  far  analogous,  and  if  the 
general  principle  is  applied  that  all  that  is  observed  in 
motion  is  change  of  position,  they  seem  as  if  they  must  be, 
so  far  as  measurement  is  concerned,  indistinguishable.  The 
observed  acceleration  of  any  body  left  to  itself  may,  in  the 
light  of  this,  be  regarded  as  due  either  to  gravitation  or  to 
inertia.  It  is  a  mere  question  of  interpretation,  under 
which  it  is  open  to  us  either  to  think  of  the  event  as 
taking  place  in  a  field  where  a  genuine  force  called  gravita- 
tion is  operating,  or,  if  we  cannot  attach  any  definite 
meaning  to  such  a  force,  to  think  of  the  system  of  reference 
from  which  we  are  observing  as  being  in  fact  itself  in  an 
accelerated  motion  equivalent  to  that  of  the  body  observed 
and  imagined  to  be  moving  under  the  influence  of  gravita- 
tion.1 On  this  footing  there  will  be  produced  exactly  the 
same  appearance  for  the  observer.  The  phenomena  will 
seem  to  obey  the  same  law  in  the  same  way,  whichever 
alternative  we  adopt.  We  really  perceive  no  force,  but  only 
relative  change  in  position.  This  result  is  in  effect  what 
Einstein  has  named  the  principle  of  equivalence. 

The  physicist  observes  relative  changes  in  the  positions 
of  objects  and  no  more.  These  changes  link  for  us  the 
objects  changing  so  uniformly  that  we  talk  of  them  as 
acting  on  each  other.  But  whenever  we  talk  so  we  come 
upon  a  fresh  difficulty.  How  is  action  at  a  distance  to  be 

1  See  p.  56,  ante. 
8 


94  EINSTEIN 

made  intelligible  ?    At  a  different  standpoint,  that  from 
which  we  observe  the  living  organism,  where  what  is  mani- 
fest is  self-control  and  behaviour  under  the   continuous 
guidance  by  an  end  inherent  in  the  object  and  no  ex- 
ternal cause  of  its  activity,  the  perplexity  does  not  arise. 
An  end  is  operative  as  just  the  self-conduct  of  the  living 
organism.     But  whenever  we  are  in  the  region  of  the 
externality  of  cause  to  effect  the  difficulty  is  unavoidable. 
There  the  form  of  causation  ab  extra  must  be  assumed, 
and  how  can  such  a  cause  operate  at  a  distance  !    The 
school  of  physicists  of  whom   I   am   speaking  claim  to 
satisfy  all  that  is  required  of  them  by  showing  that  the 
so-called  gravitational  and  inertial  forces  are  the  expres- 
sions of  a  single  fundamental  principle,  based  wholly  on 
what  is  observed  as  change  in  position,  in  accordance  with 
the  principles  of  relativity  and  equivalence.      They  do 
not  enter  into  any  metempirical  question   as  to  whether 
we  can  go  behind  the  simple  fact  of  the  behaviour  towards 
each   other   of  the   bodies  that  conform  to  the  laws  of 
relative  motion.     They  claim  that  the  problem  of  how 
action  at  a  distance  under  a  gravitational  pull  is  possible 
does  not  arise  so  far  as  they  are  concerned,  and  is  one  that 
is  superseded  for  physics.     The  principle  of  explanation 
is  equally  applicable,  whether  the  bodies  are  planets  at 
enormous  distances  from  each  other  in  a  solar  system,  or 
are  vanishing  points  separated  from  each  other  by  distances 
that  are  indefinitely  diminishable.     Here  Einstein  comes 
face  to  face  with  a  further  problem.     He  is  in  search  of 
physical  laws  which  will  be  true  for  every  description  of 
space-time  system.     The  terms  in  the  fundamental  equa- 
tions in  which  such  physical  laws  can  be  expressed,  if  space 
and  time  may  assume  any  form  and  may  be  non-Euclidean, 
must  prove  capable  of  application,  whatever  substitutions 
of  variable  co-ordinates  are  made  in  them.     They  ought, 
therefore,  so  far  as  they  refer  to  space  and  time,  to  provide 
for  their  complete  relativity,  so  as  to  exclude  from  them 
"  the  last  vestige  of  physical  objectivity."     He  works  out, 
accordingly,  a  method  of  treating  the  world  which  appears 
to  observation,  as  if  capable  of  analysis  into  motion  ex- 
pressed as  that  of  a  particle  through  ultimate  point-events 
or  world-points,  separated  only  by  indefinitely  vanishing 
distances.     These  distances,  which  give  him  line  elements 
in  what  Hermann  Minkowski  called  a   "world-line,"  are 


THE   GENERAL  THEORY  95 

not  what  we  should  call  relations  in  space  or  time,  for  they 
depend  on  a  combination  of  the  ultimate  characters  of 
both  spatial  and  temporal  quantity.  That  is  because  the 
world  as  we  observe  it  is  continuously  changing,  so  that 
the  elements  required  for  its  explanation  must  be  motional 
with  four  dimensions,  and  may  comprise  the  fundamental 
characteristics  of  both  time  and  space.  The  infinitesimal 
distances  or  intervals  between  his  point-events  have  thus 
for  Einstein  this  amount  of  physical  significance.  They 
accord  with  the  implications  of  all  possible  experiences  of 
externality.  He  applies  to  them  a  highly  refined  calculus 
which,  first  of  all,  enables  him  to  interpret  his  world-line 
as  indicating  the  motion  of  a  material  point  rectilinearly 
and  uniformly,  as  in  the  earlier  or  special  theory  of 
relativity.  This  is  symbolised  by  a  straight  path  in  four 
dimensions,  the  fourth  dimension  being  the  time-dimension 
which  is  implied  in  movement  and  required  for  the  ex- 
planation of  change.  But  by  a  further  development, 
which  converts  his  calculus  into  one  much  further-reaching, 
based  on  transformations  in  the  differential  equations 
founded  on  the  co-ordinates  of  the  point-events,  such 
that  these  equations  may  be  applicable  in  the  case  of 
every  sort  of  system  moving  even  with  accelerating  velocity, 
he  gets  for  his  result  a  principle  which  applies  when  the 
domain  is  one  where  it  is  necessary  to  recognise  the  wider 
aspect  of  relativity.  The  intervals  between  his  point- 
events  may  have  characteristics  which  have  to  be 
described  in  symbols  analogous  to  those  of  curvature. 
This  will  be  so  wherever  account  has  to  be  taken  of 
the  results  of  observing  the  varying  and  apparent  deflec- 
tions in  relative  position  and  velocity  due  to  what 
used  to  be  called  gravitation.  The  old  law  of  Newton 
was  that  a  particle,  when  not  interfered  with  by  external 
forces,  moves  uniformly  and  rectilinearly.  The  new  funda- 
mental law  which  for  Einstein  has  superseded  it  is  that 
the  world-line  of  an  infinitesimal  particle  is  a  "  geodesic  " 
path.  What  is  meant  by  a  geodesic  path  ?  As  I  understand 
Einstein  it  is  the  track  appropriate  to  whatever  is  the 
actual  character  of  the  space-time  continuum.  To  such  a 
track  the  ordinary  ideas  of  distance  in  space  and  interval  in 
time  do  not  apply.  For  we  have  not  yet  got  so  far  as  these. 
The  mathematical  interpretation  of  the  law  of  gravita- 
tion, as  I  interpret  it,  is  that  it  defines  explicitly  the 


96  EINSTEIN 

fulfilment  by  a  particle  of  the  principle  of  its  geodesic 
track.  That  track  will  be  a  unique  and  limiting  one. 
But  its  nature  has  so  far  not  got  any  characteristics 
resembling  what  depends  on  measurement  in  space  or 
time.  If  this  formula  seems  a  highly  abstract  guide  to 
the  ascertainment  of  the  behaviour  of  matter,  we  must 
remember  that  the  object  is  to  get  behind  the  merely 
relative  ideas  according  to  which  in  daily  life  we  measure 
the  relations  between  external  bodies.  It  is  these  ideas 
which  Einstein  finds  to  have  broken  down,  and  he  is 
searching  for  what  is  reliable. 

At  this  point  it  may  be  useful  to  try  to  unravel  what 
is  apt  to  prove  perplexing  to  students  of  philosophy  in 
some  of  the  statements  of  physical  results.  A  real  diffi- 
culty in  following  the  discussion  in  the  mathematical 
world  of  the  epistemological  foundation  of  space  and  time 
forms  arises  from  the  language  which  is  employed,  almost 
without  restraint.  Mathematicians  are  so  used  to  tech- 
nical expressions  based  on  space  and  time  as  currently 
accepted  that  when  they  pass  to  relations  in  the  con- 
tinuum they  adopt  these  expressions  as  if  they  were  quite 
free  to  employ  them.  But  in  the  conception  of  the  con- 
tinuum space  and  time  have  not  yet  been  differentiated 
from  each  other,  nor  does  its  character  allow  of  a  treatment 
as  if  they  contained  quantities  measurable  as  greater  or 
less  than  each  other.  The  tendency  to  use  language  which 
overlooks  this  is  one  which  must  cause  difficulty  to  philo- 
sophy quite  as  much  as  to  mathematics.  Some  mathe- 
maticians are  well  aware  of  it,  and  try  hard  to  put  on 
the  brake.  But  the  use  of  expressions  appropriate  only 
to  conventional  space  and  time  is  difficult  to  check. 
When  we  are  told,  for  example,  by  so  careful  a  writer 
as  Professor  Eddington  in  his  book  (at  p.  70)  that  the 
unique  or  actual  track  in  the  space-time  continuum  is 
not  the  "  shortest  "  but  the  "  longest,"  the  layman  is 
puzzled  until  he  recalls  that  "  longest  "  does  not  imply 
what  we  usually  mean  by  the  word,  as  referring  to  measure- 
ment of  length  in  space.  What  Professor  Eddington  says  is 
quite  intelligible  if  it  is  borne  in  mind  that  what  he  is  really 
referring  to  is  the  technical  result  of  equations  referred  to 
on  his  next  page,  and  to  the  peculiar  geometry  which 
the  minus  sign  of  time  requires.  But  I  cannot  help 
feeling  that  a  good  deal  would  be  made  clearer,  not  only  to 


QUESTIONABLE  TERMINOLOGY  97 

the  laity  but  to  the  mathematicians  themselves,  if  the 
necessity  for  distinction  were  everywhere  kept  in  sight. 

Here  there  seems  to  be  a  vast  amount  of  work  awaiting 
the  mathematical-logicians,  which  they  have  only  just 
begun  to  enter  on. 

Einstein  himself  uses  language  in  which  he  appears  to 
treat  the  continuum  as  though  it  could  be  described  in 
terms,  not  indeed  of  Euclidean  space  and  time  relations, 
but  of  relations  of  some  sort  in  space  and  time  ;  Gaussian 
co-ordinates,  for  example.  "  The  following  statement 
corresponds  to  the  fundamental  idea  of  the  general 
principle  of  relativity :  '  All  Gaussian  co-ordinate  systems 
are  essentially  equivalent  for  the  formulation  of  the  general 
laws  of  nature'"  (The  Theory  of  Relativity,  English 
translation,  chap,  xxviii).  But  in  the  days  of  Gauss 
the  continuum  had  not  been  conceived  as  Minkowski  con- 
ceived it  later  on,  and  it  was  hardly  realised  that  the 
question  of  the  character  of  its  co-ordinates  was  not  one 
of  direct  perception.  It  is  far  from  clear,  therefore,  that 
it  is  legitimate  to  express  the  relations  within  the  con- 
tinuum in  such  terms,  excepting  as  a  useful  mathematical 
device  which  can  throw  no  light  on  the  ultimate  character 
of  its  subject-matter.  Such  devices  are  often  very 
valuable.  The  task  of  the  physicist  is,  for  example, 
greatly  simplified  by  the  step  of  multiplying  the  time 
co-ordinate  in  his  equations  by  the  square  root  of  minus 
one.  But  this  is  his  own  expedient  for  getting  his 
equations  into  a  workable  form.  No  doubt  the  space 
and  time  elements,  so  far  as  they  have  an  analogue  in  the 
continuum,  must  be  described  as  related  with  what  are 
opposite  signs.  But,  even  taking  the  most  large-minded 
view  of  the  mathematical  processes  which  the  equations 
exhibit,  the  suggestion  is  inevitable  that  when  mathe- 
maticians use  in  their  absolute  equations  the  symbols  of 
arithmetic  what  we  are  dealing  with  is  measurable  in  a 
fashion  in  which  by  its  very  character  it  is  not. 

I  know  it  will  be  said  that  these  are  questions  which 
can  be  dealt  with  only  by  highly  trained  mathematicians, 
and  not  by  mere  students  of  philosophy.  That  is  in 
a  sense  true.  But  the  student  of  philosophy  has  at 
moments  to  jog  the  elbow  of  the  mathematician,  and 
to  remind  him  of  things  of  which  he  must  take  account 
when  he  is  seeking  to  explain  in  what  the  real  consists. 


98  EINSTEIN 

We  have  seen  already  how  different  from  the  loose 
ideas  ordinarily  associated  with  everyday  experience 
are  the  precise  meanings  to  be  attached  to  timeless 
space  and  spaceless  time.  Neither  can  stand  for  more 
than  an  abstraction  of  reflection,  and  yet  both  con- 
cepts are  required  in  order  to  account  for  the  harmony 
of  experience.  We  have  to  keep  their  significance  in  view 
from  a  wholly  different  standpoint  in  our  analysis  of  the 
relation  in  the  world-line.  To  the  character  of  this  rela- 
tion these  abstract  conceptions  are  the  very  antithesis. 
We  are  in  search  of  a  law  of  nature  which  concerns  what 
is  fundamental  to  experience,  and  not  merely  of  variable 
creatures  of  everyday  reflection,  such  as  are  ordinary 
space  and  time.  What  must  be  the  character  of  such  a 
law,  and  how  can  it  be  sought  for  in  a  way  that  is 
logically  admissible  ?  That  is  what  we  want  the  mathe- 
maticians to  make  clear  to  us. 

As  I  understand  what  they  have  said  so  far,  it  is  this. 
They  start  off  with  the  simple  case  of  point-events  in 
the  continuum,  assumed  to  be  separated  only  by  indefinitely 
attenuated  intervals.  Such  intervals  we  may  call,  if  we 
carefully  guard  ourselves  from  pictures  of  self-subsistent 
space  and  time,  the  shortest  paths.  We  require  co- 
ordinates for  their  definition  which  will  not  suggest  any- 
thing involving  some  particular  shape  or  measurement. 
They  must  be  applicable  in  general  terms  to  the  basis  of 
every  possible  space-time  system. 

For  the  description  of  such  an  interval  it  is  necessary 
to  employ  a  differential  equation,  as  being  the  only  effec- 
tive means  of  eliminating  what  is  irrelevant,  and  of  at 
the  same  time  attaining  to  precision.  The  path  of  a 
particle  in  the  interval  must,  if  the  conditions  of  its 
limiting  character  are  to  be  complied  with,  be  geodesically 
the  most  direct  of  all  natural  paths,  in  the  only  meaning 
which  can  be  attached  to  what  combines  spatial  with 
temporal  analogues,  their  inverse  proportions  notwith- 
standing. By  "  natural "  I  mean  what  is  appropriate 
to  the  kind  of  reality  to  which  the  track  belongs. 
In  formulating  this  interval  the  equation  describing 
it  of  course  must  not  be  confined  to  variables  de- 
pending on  any  particular  system  of  measurement. 
The  equations  and  the  co-ordinates  employed  in  them 
must  therefore  be  made,  if  possible,  co-variant  in  such  a 


COINCIDENCE  AND   INTERVALS  99 

way  that  they  may  apply  in  the  case  of  every  possible 
space-time  system.  On  this  footing  we  may  start  by 
taking  our  ordinary  perceptions  and  dissecting  out  their 
contents  by  abstraction.  We  have,  of  course,  to  be  sure 
that  the  perceptions  from  which  we  start  all  belong  to  a 
single  space-time  system.  The  reason  is  plain.  We 
depend  throughout  on  being  able  to  ascertain  coinci- 
dences. Observation,  in  order  to  be  of  any  value,  de- 
pends in  the  main  on  our  being  able  to  ascertain  that 
two  points  on  which  we  have  fixed  attention  stand  in  some 
relation  of  coincidence  at  the  same  moment  in  the  same 
time-system. 

But  here  there  arises  a  further  point.  Coincidence  of 
this  kind  does  not  require  measurement.  If  the  intervals 
are  not  of  Euclidean  straightness,  but  are  of  some  sort  of 
curvilinear  character,  there  may  still  be  coincidence,  just 
as  much  as  if  the  interval  were  a  straight  line.  The  co- 
ordinates which  refer  to  magnitude  may  therefore  express 
any  form  of  magnitude,  provided  they  define  the  coinci- 
dences in  terms  which  express  them,  apart  from  any  par- 
ticular form  in  measurement.  If  a  formula  describing  the 
interval  mathematically  can  be  found  which  will  be  true 
whatever  the  nature  of  the  further  co-ordinates  introduced, 
provided  they  fall  within  the  description  of  being  functions 
of  the  original  co-ordinates,  there  will  have  been  discovered 
a  mode  of  ascertaining  the  nature  of  the  interval  in  the 
continuum  with  exactness,  which  will  remain  applicable  if 
at  a  later  stage  there  are  introduced  further  values  based 
on  particular  observations  of  the  ordinary  kind.  When, 
by  thus  introducing  particular  results  of  observation,  say 
of  the  heavenly  bodies,  we  give  to  the  new  co-ordinates 
special  numerical  meanings,  we  shall  still  have  preserved 
the  general  relation,  and  can  make  it  the  foundation  of  a 
law  of  motion  that  is  at  once  of  the  utmost  generality  in 
application  and  independent  of  all  particular  systems 
of  observation. 

Mathematical  investigation  of  a  high  order  has  led  to 
the  discovery  of  equations  which  express  this  basis.  The 
"  interval  "  can  now  be  defined  in  terms  which  admit  of 
indefinite  variation  in  detail,  while  preserving  the  relation- 
ships which  are  necessary  for  its  determination.  The 
equations  are  "  co-variant  "  for  any  substitutions  of  co- 
ordinate values.  There  is  thus  obtained  an  accurate 


100  EINSTEIN 

description  for  the  continuum  and  for  the  activity  in  which 
it  consists.  Space  and  time  as  physical  entities  per  se  are 
banished  from  the  ultimate  foundations  of  physics. 

The  theory  of  how  to  find  mathematical  expressions  of 
a  character  so  general  that  they  can  be  used  in  the  equa- 
tions descriptive  of  intervals  in  such  a  fashion  that  the 
equations  remain  true,  however  the  co-ordinates  to  which 
they  relate  vary  in  detail,  is  called  the  theory  of  "  Tensors." 
Tensors  are  expressions  which  seem  to  include  intrinsic 
qualities  of  the  continuum,  and  may  be  applied  in  the 
form  of  groups  ascertained  in  reference  to  it.  They  stand 
for  what  are  qualities  more  than  for  definite  quantities, 
and  they  not  the  less  admit  of  application  to  the  results  of 
observations  made  in  empirical  space  and  time  of  any 
kind,  such  as  are  the  gravitational  potentials.  They  are 
so  applied  by  introducing  the  results  of  actual  spatio- 
temporal  measurements,  and  yet  they  are  such  that  values 
of  the  same  character  for  the  ultimate  relations  in  the 
continuum  are  obtained,  whatever  system  of  space  and 
time  measurement  may  be  adopted.  About  Tensors,  Pro- 
fessor Whitehead  makes  the  grim  observation  that  "  the 
announcement  that  physicists  would  have  in  future  to 
study  the  theory  of  Tensors  created  a  veritable  panic 
among  them  when  the  verification  of  Einstein's  prediction 
was  first  announced."  l 

It  is  not  easy  to  describe  in  ordinary  language  what 
can  be  characterised  with  freedom  by  mathematical 
methods  alone.  Still,  there  is  room  for  an  effort  to  do  so, 
inasmuch  as  such  an  effort  is  required  for  the  philosophical 
interpretation  of  the  true  nature  of  the  continuum  that 
lies  at  the  foundation  of  our  world  in  space  and  time. 

If  we  fix  our  minds  on  the  conception  of  an  indefinitely 
vanishing  phase  in  our  experience  of  that  world,  and  by 
abstraction  extrude  the  notions  of  measurement  and 
shape  which  arise  in  reflection,  we  find  ourselves  con- 
fronted with  bare  awareness  of  change.  It  is  change  in 
which  space  and  time  have  not  yet  been  discriminated,  but 

1  The  reader  who  wishes  to  try  to  explore  the  elements  of  the  mathe- 
matics involved  may  find  helpful  a  book  by  Professor  Moritz  Schlick, 
Space  and  Time  in  Contemporary  Physics  (English  translation  by  Brose, 
Clarendon  Press).  Along  with  this  he  may  read  profitably  Professor 
Eddington's  book,  Space,  Time  and  Gravitation,  at  pp.  89  and  189.  If  he 
desires  to  pursue  the  subject  into  mathematical  details  he  may  turn  to 
the  Report  on  the  Relativity  Theory  of  Gravitation  published  by  the  latter 
(Fleetway  Press,  1920). 


TENSORS  101 

is  just  the  activity  out  of  which  we  build  up  our  concep- 
tions of  them.  This  activity  gives  us  paths  of  the  never 
static  point-events  towards  which -our  actual  experience 
tends  as  its  limits.  We  approximate  thus  to  these  paths 
as  what  Minkowski  called  the  "  world-lines  "  of  the -point- 
events,  and  to  "  intervals  "  between  them.  Such  intervals 
are  neither  spatial  nor  temporal,  but  they  express  what 
lies  at  the  very  foundation  on  which  we  build  up  our 
ideas  of  space  and  time  as  relations.  Still,  they  can  be 
described,  for  we  are  aware,  even  in  this  abstract  region, 
of  coincidences.  The  intervals  intersect  and  are  related 
to  each  other  by  what  we  recognise  as  positions  in  the 
activities  that  are  antecedent  to  definite  spaces  and  times. 
We  can  thus  describe  our  world-lines  with  their  intervals. 
This  mathematicians  do  by  defining  co-ordinates  of 
position  for  the  coincidences  observed,  bare  co-ordinates 
to  which  the  ideas  of  shape  and  measurement  have  no 
application,  but  which  are  yet  sufficiently  describable  to 
admit  of  their  character  being  sufficiently  ascertained  in 
general  terms.  By  the  employment  of  differential  equa- 
tions, so  as  to  obtain  purely  limiting  notions,  what  is 
irrelevant  is  eliminated,  and  the  dominating  conception  be- 
comes that  of  points  approximating  with  infinite  closeness. 
The  equations  which  thus  describe  the  relations  of 
what  is  indefinitely  vanishing  in  our  actual  experience 
have  thus  on  their  right-hand  sides  co-ordinates  referring 
to  infinitesimals  of  observation,  but  these  co-ordinates 
express  mere  functions  of  position  depending  on  bare 
coincidence  in  the  result,  and  have  at  this  stage  nothing 
to  do  with  either  shape  or  measurement.  Still,  the 
equations  define  definite  relations,  relations  which  will 
continue  to  obtain  whatever  may  be  the  shape  and 
measurement  subsequently  superinduced  as  the  result 
of  observation  and  experiment.  The  equations,  which 
are  triumphs  of  mathematical  genius,  and  are  of  a  char- 
acter so  refined  as  to  be  very  complicated,  contain  on 
the  right-hand  side  the  symbols  of  a  set  of  functions  of 
what  may  be  termed,  if  we  carefully  qualify  the  ordinary 
suggestions  of  words,  the  foundations  of  the  space -time 
continuum,  extending  to  features  out  of  which  both 
space  and  time  may  arise.  Shape  and  duration  are 
excluded  along  with  measurement.  The  expressions  used 
are  so  formulated  as  to  be  applicable  whether  the  co- 


102  EINSTEIN 

ordinates  are  subsequently  developed  into  what  are 
appropriate  to  space  and  time  as  Newton  conceived  them, 
and  aie  so  made,  rectangular,  or  are  polar  or  oblique  or  of 
a  different  or  curved  nature.  Whatever  the  character  of 
wjbat  is  later  on  observed  is  determined  to  be,  the  linear 
relation  in  the  equations  of  the  expressions  defining  the 
intervals  will  hold  good.  The  name  given  by  mathema- 
ticians to  expressions  of  this  kind  is  that  of  tensors.  The 
tensor  principle  can  be  extended  when  our  experience  is  such 
that  account  must  be  taken  of  matter  as  present  in  the  con- 
tinuum, and  it  then  yields  equations  of  a  still  more  intricate 
character,  based  on  certain  very  general  characteristics  of 
such  matter,  but  still  independent  of  space  and  time. 

Our  knowledge  is  rendered  at  a  later  stage  particular, 
by  observation  and  experiment ;  and  this  involves  the 
application,  not  only  of  measurement  to  space  and  time, 
but  of  some  particular  geometry.  According  to  Einstein's 
general  theory  of  relativity  there  is  no  one  geometry  of  the 
universe.  The  characters  of  the  relations  which  we  call 
space  and  time  arise  from  the  varying  movements  of 
bodies  changing  their  situations  relatively  to  each  other 
and  to  the  observer.  The  new  method  gives  a  law  of  such 
change  which  is  independent  of  such  relativity.  We 
have  seen  how  gravitation  can  be  expressed  merely  as  an 
illustration  of  movement,  and  how  Newton's  law  of 
gravitation  assumed  a  particular  hypothesis  as  to  space 
and  time.  Einstein  therefore  substitutes  a  more  funda- 
mental law,  concerned  primarily  with  relations  in  the 
continuum  purely  as  such,  and  with  the  changing  relations 
of  objects  independently  of  any  particular  space-time 
system.  It  is  necessarily  formulated  as  a  law  of  activity 
in  the  continuum  itself,  presupposed  before  we  can  attain  to 
shape  and  measurement.  The  path  described  is  inde- 
pendent of  particular  forms.  It  depends  on  the  character 
of  the  underlying  continuum  itself  and  is  called  a  geodesic 
line.  Newton's  law  of  motion  was  to  the  effect  that  a 
point  if  undisturbed  by  any  extraneous  force  moved 
uniformly  and  rectilinearly.  Einstein's  law,  which  extends 
to  both  inertial  and  gravitational  effects,  because  of  his 
principle  of  their  equivalence,  asserts  that  a  point  in 
motion  in  a  gravitational  field  has  as  its  world-line  the 
shortest  path  in  the  continuum.  Shortest  only  means 
most  direct,  having  regard  to  the  character  in  point  of 


THE   METHOD  103 

anything  analogous  in  the  continuum  to  what  we  have 
in  our  heads  when  we  talk  of  curvature.  In  a  different 
sense  the  path  may  prove  mathematically  describable  as 
the  longest,  or  as  a  maximum.  The  fundamentally  inverse 
relationship  of  the  spatial  and  temporal  characters  may 
necessitate  such  a  description  as  the  outcome  of  the  only 
appropriate  form  of  the  equations  employed. 

When  physicists  have  to  apply  the  method  of  Einstein, 
if  they  are  to  deal  with  the  concrete  facts  observed,  they 
measure  in  the  usual  way,  and  then  bring  the  quantities 
so  obtained  within  the  scope  of  the  tensor  equations.  In 
this  fashion  the  basic  laws  expressed  in  the  latter  enable 
events  in  the  space  and  time  systems  encountered  to  be 
correctly  represented  in  their  true  characters.  The 
specification  required  is  made  by  ascertaining  measured 
values — for  example,  the  measurements  of  the  distribution 
and  motion  of  gravitating  bodies.  The  functions  expressed 
in  the  tensors  thus  get  a  particular  application,  but  the 
fundamental  relations  and  the  laws  which  result  from 
them  remain.  Misleading  inferences  based  on  what 
appears  as  it  does  merely  from  the  situation  of  the  par- 
ticular observer  are  thus  corrected.  It  was  by  so  dividing 
the  investigation  into  the  two  stages  which  the  doctrine 
of  physical  relativity  requires  that  Einstein  was  able  to 
correct  calculations,  based  on  Newtonian  assumptions, 
as  to  the  objective  and  uniform  character  of  relations  in 
space  and  time,  and  to  predict  that  the  deflection  of  the 
rays  from  fixed  stars  observed  on  the  occasion  of  the 
eclipse  in  May  1919  would  be  found  to  be  what  observa- 
tion established,  more  nearly  1"*74  than  0"'87.  His 
explanation  of  the  supposed  movement  of  the  perihelion 
of  Mercury  was  arrived  at  by  the  same  method. 

Lest  this  account  of  the  method  should  seem  lacking 
in  technical  clearness  I  will  venture,  though  not  without 
hesitation,  to  try  to  express  it  in  other  words  more  familiar 
to  those  concerned  with  the  special  subject  immediately 
under  discussion  in  this  chapter.  The  general  character 
of  the  continuum  may,  I  gather,  be  described  as  follows. 
The  intervals  from  any  point-event  P  to  the  assemblage 
of  neighbouring  point-events  have  certain  characters. 
These  characters  can  all  be  expressed  in  terms  of  a 
set  of  functions  of  co-ordinates  of  P,  so  that  if  Q 
be  a  neighbouring  point-event  the  relation  of  Q  to  P 


104  EINSTEIN 

depends  (1)  on  the  small  differences  of  the  corresponding 
co-ordinates  of  Q  and  P,  and  (2)  on  the  above-mentioned 
set  of  functions.  If  these  functions  are  regarded  as  the 
characteristic  functions  at  P,  then  the  relation  of  P  to  Q 
is  defined  by  the  differences  of  the  co-ordinates  and  by 
the  characteristic  functions. 

Now  alternative  systems  of  co-ordinates  for  the  con- 
tinuum can  be  adopted.  Each  alternative  system  of 
co-ordinates  necessitates  an  alternative  system  of  char- 
acteristic functions.  But  the  relation  is  such  that  the 
characteristic  functions  at  any  point  P  of  one  system  of 
co-ordinates  can  be  expressed  linearly  in  terms  of  the 
characteristic  functions  of  the  other  set  of  co-ordinates. 
This  property  is  called  the  tensor  property  of  the  sets  of 
characteristic  functions. 

What  I  have  ventured  to  say  must  be  taken  as  pre- 
tending to  record  no  more  than  it  does,  the  impressions  of 
a  non-mathematician  about  what  the  mathematicians  are 
saying  to  each  other  when  they  enter  the  borderland  of 
philosophy  and  speak  about  it  among  themselves.  The 
impression  is  that  of  a  stranger  in  whose  presence  they 
talk,  but  who,  although  keenly  interested  in  learning  from 
them,  is  but  imperfectly  acquainted  with  a  language  which 
to  them  is  one  of  second  nature.  They  may,  therefore,  be 
gentle  with  him  if  his  accent  seems  strange  and  his  capacity 
to  do  justice  to  their  words  appears  inadequate.  His 
reason  for  listening  and  in  his  turn  making  comments 
does  not  appear  to  be  an  irrelevant  one.  They  are  in  a 
territory  that  is  occupied  in  common,  and  forbearance  on 
both  sides  is  therefore  necessary.  I  do  not  believe  that 
the  fundamental  conceptions  are  as  obscure  as  some  of  the 
mathematicians  take  them  to  be.  The  reason  they  seem 
so  is  that  they  are  concerned  with  matters  which  involve 
consideration  of  a  more  than  merely  mathematical  char- 
acter. For  the  rest  I  am  not  lacking  in  admiration  for 
the  splendid  power  of  the  instruments  the  mathematicians 
possess,  and  the  wonderful  results  they  have  achieved 
with  them  ;  instruments  which  impress  me  not  the  less 
because  it  is  beyond  my  powers  to  wield  them. 

It  may  have  been  observed  how  far-reaching  are  the 
consequences  of  the  new  interpretation  of  what  lies  at  the 
foundations  of  our  perception  of  motion.  We  are  brought 
face  to  face  with  the  necessity  of  giving  it  a  meaning  very 


THE  LAW  OF  MOTION  105 

different  from  that  which  it  had  for  Newton.  Let  us 
glance  at  the  contrast  between  these  meanings.  For 
Newton  it  is,  for  example,  a  proposition  of  universal 
application  that  two  material  bodies  attract  each  other 
with  a  force  proportional  to  the  product  of  their  masses 
and  inversely  proportional  to  the  square  of  their  distance. 
But  if  the  general  theory  of  relativity  be  true  this  is  a 
statement  of  fact  which,  if  it  professes  to  be  exact,  is  quite 
inadequate.  It  assumes,  to  begin  with,  a  single  definite 
space  and  a  single  definite  time,  in  which  the  two  bodies 
are  taken  to  be  in  simultaneous  positions.  But,  as 
Einstein  and  Professor  Eddington,  as  well  as  Professor 
Whitehead  from  another  point  of  view,  have  said,  what  is 
simultaneous  in  one  time -system  may  not  be  simultaneous 
in  another,  and  the  distance  between  two  bodies,  as  well  as 
apparent  coincidences,  may  also  have  a  different  significance 
in  different  space-systems.  The  law  is  therefore  incomplete. 
It  is  only  by  going  deeper  down  that  we  can  hope  to  find 
a  fundamental  and  universally  true  law  of  motion. 

Inertial  and  gravitational  mass,  for  the  general  theory 
of  relativity,  are  indistinguishable  in  character.  They  have 
no  absolute  significance.  Mass  finds  its  meaning  in  the 
presence  and  relative  positions  of  bodies.  Mechanics  now 
seems  to  become  a  general  theory  of  relative  motion,  so  far 
as  direct  observation  is  concerned.  Any  fundamental  law 
of  mechanics  must,  if  difficulties  over  the  conception  of 
action  at  a  distance  are  to  be  eliminated,  be  a  differential 
law,  containing  only  the  description  of  an  interval  with  no 
finite  distance  between  the  point- events  it  separates.  In 
the  special  theory  of  relativity  the  velocity  of  light  was 
treated  as  an  absolute  constant,  and  had  to  be  so.  It 
appears  questionable  whether  in  the  light  cast  by  the 
general  theory  it  ought  to  be  thus  treated. 

There  is  no  unvarying  geometry  of  distance  or  measure- 
ment. Just  because  in  the  general  theory  of  relativity  the 
ultimate  relation  in  the  continuum  which  underlies  all  par- 
ticular observations  preserves  its  form  irrespectively  of 
how  the  variables  that  form  the  co-ordinates  in  its  equa- 
tions are  estimated  in  shape  and  quantity,  so  the  relation 
has  no  self-contained  and  direct  application  in  our  current 
interpretations  of  observations  of  nature,  and  does  not, 
taken  by  itself,  express  the  time  and  space  of  our  individual 
experience.  But  the  relation  is  basic  for  all  forms  and 


106  EINSTEIN 

variations  of  such  experience.  The  fundamental  law  of 
motion  must  therefore  be  of  a  character  quite  different 
from  that  of  gravitation  as  stated  by  Newton.  It  is,  as 
Professor  Eddington  has  pointed  out,  not  so  much  a  law 
as  a  definition,  expressing  the  way  in  which  point-events 
in  the  continuum  are  related.  It  supersedes,  not  only 
Newton's  law  of  gravitation,  but  his  principle  of  inertia, 
in  so  far  as  that  implies  that  a  particle  when  undeflected  by 
extraneous  forces  moves  uniformly  and  rectilinearly.  The 
new  law  is  a  mathematical  expression  which  describes  the 
character  of  the  activity  in  the  "world-line"  of  the  con- 
tinuum of  a  particle  as  being  a  geodesic  line  in  that 
continuum. 

Into  the  differential  equations  in  which  the  fundamental 
relation  is  expressed  there  are  introduced  the  "  tensors," 
which  admit  of  relations  to  the  intrinsic  qualities  of  the 
continuum  of  further  and  varying  elements  to  be  derived 
from  particular  observation.  The  tensors  seem,  as  I  have  re- 
marked, to  represent  qualitative  characteristics  rather  than 
ordinary  quantities,  and  to  express  the  relations  of  the  point- 
event  in  the  field  to  which  they  belong  in  the  continuum. 
These  factors  appear  in  the  equations  in  their  further  forms 
in  groups,  but  the  older  mathematicians,  who  anticipated 
their  shape,  hardly  thought  of  these  fundamental  elements 
excepting  as  having  the  nature  of  geometrical  quantities, 
by  which  the  metrical  properties  of  space  were  to  be 
ascertained.  Such  tensors  not  only  allow  of  a  physical 
interpretation  under  Einstein's  doctrine,  but  such  an  inter- 
pretation is  called  for  in  order  to  provide  an  adequate 
expression  for  motion  in  the  indefinitely  varying  forms  of 
the  gravitational  field.  The  development  of  the  original 
formulas  is  required  to  define  the  way  in  which  they  apply 
for  the  purposes  of  physical  description.  The  original 
formulas  themselves  are  essential  if  our  knowledge  is  to 
be  more  than  merely  relative  to  our  position  as  observers. 
For,  to  quote  Einstein's  own  words  in  the  chapter  on  the 
space-time  continuum  in  his  book  on  the  Theory  of  Rela- 
tivity, "  Every  physical  description  resolves  itself  into  a 
number  of  statements,  each  of  which  refers  to  the  space- 
time  coincidence  of  two  events  A  and  B." 

By  applying  his  development  of  the  calculus  in  this  wider 
form  Einstein  is  able  to  determine  the  exact  nature  of  the 
distribution  and  motion  of  every  sort  of  gravitating  body. 


EUCLIDEAN  GEOMETRY  107 

It  is  a  triumph  for  mathematical  methods.  But  it  is  not 
only  what  we  call  matter  that  is  subject  to  gravitational 
deflection.  From  the  standpoint  of  relativity  energy, 
integrated  by  operation  in  time  into  enduring  action,  must 
obviously  appear,  whenever  that  operation  can  be  observed, 
as  subject  equally  with  what  is  called  matter  to  apparent 
gravitational  deflection.  Such  energy,  moreover,  becomes 
indistinguishable  in  character  from  inertial  mass.  This 
results  from  the  fundamental  principle  underlying  the 
general  theory  of  relativity. 

The  fruits  of  that  theory  and  of  such  laws  as  I  have 
above  referred  to  do  not  cease  here.  They  have  been 
developed  by  their  author  into  mathematical  consequences, 
which  have  given  explanations  of  what  was  inexplicable  on 
Newtonian  principles  taking  no  account  of  relativity. 
Whatever  criticism  may  have  in  store  for  his  doctrine,  it 
has  at  least  accomplished  several  great  advances.  It  has 
made  the  physical  picture  which  the  universe  presents 
more  intelligible  to  science ;  it  has  banished  out  of  physics 
the  necessity  of  attributing  an  objective  character  to 
gravitation,  the  force  which  has  always  been  under  sus- 
picion in  so  far  as  it  seemed  to  necessitate  the  hypothesis 
of  action  at  a  distance;  and,  finally,  it  has  enabled  all 
the  laws  that  underlie  physical  events  to  be  reduced  to 
differential  equations,  an  advantage  not  the  less  real 
because  only  a  mathematician  can  be  happy  with  it. 

One  word  more  about  space.  It  is  often  said  that 
Einstein  has  sought  to  abolish  Euclidean  space  and  Eucli- 
dean geometry  with  it.  This  is  not  accurate.  His  method 
is  one  of  complete  relativity,  so  far  as  direct  experience 
goes.  It  therefore  applies  to  every  kind  of  space,  and 
admits  of  Euclidean  as  well  as  of  non-Euclidean  geometry, 
whenever  applicable.  That  is  because  space  and  its  shape 
and  measurement  are  on  his  theory  what  they  seem  to  be 
only  by  reason  of  the  position  of  the  observer  and  the 
system  under  which  he  observes.  Accelerating  velocities 
and  deviations  from  rectilinear  movement  in  relation  to 
each  other  of  systems  of  observation  may  give  the  space 
that  appears  any  form.  It  can  have  no  standard  or 
absolute  shape,  independent  of  the  system  conformed  to  in 
observation,  consistently  with  the  principle  of  relativity. 
Consequently  the  spatial  universe  may  as  well  prove  to  be 
non-Euclidean  as  to  be  Euclidean,  and  its  lines  and  its 


108  EINSTEIN 

planes  may  as  readily  possess  curvature  as  straightness. 
It  follows  that  we  may  require  a  number  of  alternative 
geometries.  That  this  should  be  so  is  natural  as  well  as 
necessary,  and  the  calculus  of  Einstein  is  so  fashioned  as 
to  provide  for  it.  But  Euclidean  space  obviously  remains 
as  one  of  the  infinity  of  variations  of  which  his  method 
can  take  account.  It  is  an  aspect  of  nature  which,  so  far 
as  logic  is  concerned,  need  not  have  presented  itself, 
though  in  practice  we  treat  it  as  having  done  so,  and  find 
that  the  assumption  is  sufficiently  true  for  most  purposes. 
Even  Einstein's  variations  of  that  assumption  are  not  very 
great  for  everyday  practical  purposes.  But,  from  the 
standpoints  of  science  and  philosophy  alike,  we  have  to 
distinguish  the  kind  of  reality  that  pertains  to  special  and 
particular  aspects  of  space  and  time  from  the  permanent 
character  which  belongs  to  those  ultimate  underlying 
relations,  ascertained  only  analytically,  but  not  the  less 
as  belonging  to  reality,  that  are  the  foundation  of  the 
mathematico- physical  laws  relating  to  the  disposition  of 
point-events,  and  so  to  what  is  believed  by  Einstein  to  be 
omnipresent  in  nature. 

In  a  remarkable  article  in  Mind,  written  in  the  April 
number  for  1920,  the  substance  of  which  on  this  point  is 
repeated,  but  perhaps  with  less  emphasis  on  its  philosophical 
suggestions,  in  the  book  he  has  recently  published  under 
the  title  Space,  Time  and  Gravitation,  Professor  Eddington 
has  pointed  out  that  Einstein's  equation,  in  which  he 
expresses  the  fundamental  principle  of  what  used  to  be 
called  gravitation,  is  not  in  the  ordinary  sense  a  law  of 
nature,  but  really  a  highly  pregnant  definition  of  such 
mere  alteration  of  position  as  might  be  attributable  in  a 
vacuum.  The  equations  concerned  deal  primarily  only 
with  the  abstract  entities  we  call  point- events.  The  theory 
of  relativity  tells  us  that  in  the  primary  definition  we  are 
not  yet  concerned  with  matter,  but  only  with  motion 
treated  so  generally  that  we  have  eliminated  the  elusive 
idea  of  particular  particles  of  matter  remaining  permanently 
identical,  and  also  all  particular  measurements  of  space 
and  time.  We  are  not  yet  occupied  with  what  our  direct 
perception  will  disclose  about  the  details  of  the  external 
world.  We  are  occupied  only  with  the  basic  conceptions 
apart  from  which  that  world  would  not  have  any  ordered 
meaning  for  us.  It  is  only  after  we  have  applied  these 


PROFESSOR  EDDINGTON  109 

conceptions  that  we  learn  what  the  density  and  state  of 
motion  of  matter  truly  signify  for  the  man  of  science.  We 
have  then  to  deal  with  what  are  further  elements,  belonging 
in  a  less  degree  to  the  foundations  of  experience,  but  con- 
forming to  the  principles  which  lie  at  these  ultimate  founda- 
tions, because  otherwise  such  elements  could  not  present 
themselves  in  experience  at  all.  To  those  who  know 
Kant's  Critique  of  Pure  Reason,  something  of  an  analogy 
suggests  itself  here.  Professor  Eddington  goes  on  to  say 
that  in  reality  matter  does  not  cause  unevenness  in  the 
gravitational  field,  inasmuch  as  the  unevenness  of  the  field 
is  just  what  we  really  mean  by  matter.  He  suggests  that 
"  the  intervention  of  mind  in  the  laws  of  nature  is  more 
far-reaching  than  is  usually  supposed  by  physicists."  He 
is  even  "  almost  inclined  to  attribute  the  whole  responsi- 
bility for  the  laws  of  mechanics  and  gravitation  to  the 
mind,  and  deny  the  external  world  any  share  in  them." 
"  The  physical  theories,"  he  says  in  concluding  his  article, 
"  which  form  the  bases  of  this  argument  are  still  on  trial, 
and  I  am  far  from  asserting  that  this  philosophy  of  matter 
is  a  necessary  consequence  of  discoveries  in  physics.  It 
is  sufficient  that  we  have  found  one  mode  of  thought  tending 
towards  the  view  that  matter  is  a  property  of  the  world 
singled  out  by  mind  on  account  of  its  permanence,  as  the 
eye  ranging  over  the  ocean  singles  out  the  wave  form  for 
its  permanence  among  the  moving  waters ;  that  the  so- 
called  laws  of  nature  which  have  been  definitely  formulated 
by  physicists  are  implicitly  contained  in  this  identification, 
and  are  therefore  indirectly  imposed  by  the  mind  ;  whereas 
the  laws  which  we  have  hitherto  been  unable  to  fit  into  a 
rational  scheme  are  the  true  natural  laws  inherent  in  the 
external  world,  and  mind  has  had  no  chance  of  moulding 
them  in  accordance  with  its  own  outlook." 

In  using  such  language  Professor  Eddington  is  in  the 
metaphysical  borderland  of  mathematics.  The  mind, 
whose  moulding  influence  he  suggests,  does  not  present 
itself  to  him  as  mind  in  the  foundational  interpretation 
which  Aristotle,  for  example,  gave  to  it.  It  seems  to 
mean  rather  a  particular  human  mind,  or  at  least  a  mind 
distinguished  as  a  self,  in  some  sense  separated  from  an 
independent  system  of  nature  that  confronts  it,  while 
moulding  the  appearance  of  that  system  to  the  form  which 
it  imposes.  If  so,  what  is  important  is  rather  the  form 

9 


110  EINSTEIN 

thus  imposed  db  extra  than  the  merely  residuary  objective 
existence.  That  existence  may  account  for  certain  natural 
elements  which  the  mind  cannot  mould  in  accordance 
with  its  own  outlook.  It  may  even  furnish,  as  Professor 
Eddington  suggests  in  his  article  in  Mind,  the  four-dimen- 
sional aggregate  of  point-events.  But  the  laws  of  gravita- 
tion and  of  mechanics  generally  he  doubts  whether  it  can 
account  for.  If  he  is  justified  in  this  doubt,  his  position 
seems  to  be  even  more  akin  to  that  of  believers  in  the 
principle  of  "  Representative  Perception,"  like  those  of  the 
school  to  which  Sir  William  Hamilton  belonged,  than  it  is  to 
that  of  Kant,  although  it  is  nearer  to  that  of  Kant  than  to 
the  doctrine  of  Aristotle  to  which  I  have  already  referred. 
Einstein  himself  does  not  seem  to  have  pronounced  in 
favour  of  any  particular  philosophical  views,  although 
apparently,  like  his  Cambridge  commentator,  at  moments 
he  leans  towards  subjectivity  in  his  interpretation  of  our 
experience  of  relativity.  But  not  altogether.  For  his 
German  disciples,  Freundlich  and  Schlick,  in  their  books 
on  his  doctrine,  have  both  drawn  attention  to  its  connec- 
tion with  an  observation  made  by  Riemann  which  bears  on 
the  necessity  of  finding  for  the  measurements  of  time  and 
space,  in  whatever  general  form  they  may  be  expressed, 
some  ultimate  physical  basis.  The  last-named  mathe- 
matician used  these  words  :  "  The  question  of  the  validity 
of  the  hypotheses  of  geometry  in  the  infinitely  small  is 
bound  up  with  the  question  of  the  ground  of  the  metric 
relations  of  space.  In  this  question,  which  we  may  still 
regard  as  belonging  to  the  doctrine  of  space,  is  found  the 
application  of  the  remark  made  above ;  that  in  a  discrete 
manifold  the  principle  or  character  of  its  metric  relations 
is  already  given  in  the  notion  of  the  manifold  "  (because 
we  can  measure  it  by  mere  counting,  there  being  no  con- 
tinuous transition  from  one  single  element  to  another,  and 
each  being  a  single  entity  in  an  arithmetical  aggregate), 
"  whereas  in  a  continuous  manifold  this  ground  has  to  be 
found  elsewhere,  i.e.  has  to  come  from  outside.  Either, 
therefore,  the  reality  which  underlies  space  must  form  a 
discrete  manifold,  or  we  must  seek  the  ground  of  its  metric 
relations  (measure-conditions)  outside  it,  in  binding  forces 
which  act  on  it."  Such  "  binding  forces  "  both  Freundlich 
and  Schlick  appear  to  find  in  relations  between  the  intervals 
of  points  in  motion  and  the  influence  of  a  gravitational 


RIEMANN  111 

field.  The  absolute  equations,  which  Einstein  has  adopted 
from  Riemann,  give  a  world-line  in  which  a  point  moves,  as 
described  in  terms  of  the  new  co-ordinates  in  the  equations, 
under  gravitational  influence,  that  is  in  time  and  space  of 
any  form.  The  factors  which  stand  for  gravitational  forces 
therefore  represent  the  inner  or  objective  ground  of  the 
measure  relations  of  the  space-time  manifold.  Freundlich, 
however,  in  Note  6  to  his  book  on  the  foundations  of 
Einstein's  Theory  of  Gravitation,  suggests  a  doubt.  He 
says  that  until  recently  the  energy  which  a  body  emanates 
by  radiation  was  regarded  as  a  quantity  which  varied  con- 
tinuously. But  he  remarks  that  the  researches  of  Max 
Planck  have  led  to  the  view  that  this  energy  is  emitted  in 
"  quanta,"  and  that  therefore  the  measuring  of  its  amount 
is  to  be  performed  by  counting  these  "  quanta."  The 
reality  underlying  radiant  energy  is  in  that  case  a  discrete 
and  not  a  continuous  manifold.  "  If,"  he  observes,  "  we 
now  suppose  that  the  view  were  gradually  to  take  root 
that,  on  the  one  hand,  all  measurements  in  space  only  have 
to  do  with  distances  between  aether-atoms  ;  and  that,  on 
the  other  hand,  the  distances  of  single  aether-atoms  from 
one  another  can  only  assume  certain  definite  values,  all 
distances  in  space  would  be  obtained  by  "  counting  "  these 
values,  and  we  should  have  to  regard  space  as  a  discrete 
manifold." 

Into  the  physical  questions  thus  raised  in  connection 
with  the  "  quanta  "  theory,  I  do  not  feel  myself  competent 
to  enter,  and  I  will  not  presume  to  do  more  than  refer  to 
their  existence,  and  only  mention  them  because  they  seem 
to  me  to  point  to  considerations  which  go  beyond  mathe- 
matics and  physics  and  belong  in  part  at  least  to  the 
domain  of  philosophy.  To  these  I  have  referred  in  the 
preceding  chapter.  It  does  not  seem  clear  that,  if 
Riemann's  "  binding  forces  "  are  necessary,  they  have  a 
sufficient  explanation  in  the  suggestion  of  gravitational 
equivalence,  or  even  that  the  necessity  of  a  continuous 
manifold  as  their  independent  physical  foundation  is 
sufficient,  on  the  only  principles  with  which  Einstein  con- 
cerns himself.  For  space  and  time  and  their  measurement 
belong  exclusively  to  a  later  stage,  a  stage  which  had  not 
yet  been  differentiated  in  Riemann's  day,  and  to  which 
stage  the  "  quanta "  theory,  concerned  as  it  is  with 
physical  energy,  may  turn  out  to  belong. 


112  EINSTEIN 

But  even  so,  in  his  apparent  unconsciousness  of  how  little 
of  an  epistemological  nature  he  assumes,  Einstein  is  in 
conflict  with  views  expressed  by  Professor  Whitehead. 
In  his  Concept  of  Nature,  the  latter  adheres  firmly  to  the 
hypothesis  that  nature  can  be  investigated  as  self-contained 
apart  from  and  independently  of  the  mental  operations 
of  the  observer.  The  meanings  which  are  of  its  essence 
represent  our  renderings  of  an  actual  and  objectively  real 
character  in  what  we  apprehend  in  these  meanings.  He 
disclaims  any  intention  in  saying  so  to  trench  on  farther- 
reaching  questions  relating  to  any  system  which  may 
explain  mind  and  its  objects  in  their  relationship.  Mathe- 
matics and  physics  are  for  him  concerned  only  with  an 
object-world  of  nature  conceived  as  self-subsistent.  So 
far  he  does  not  differ  in  fundamentals  from  what  Kant 
might  have  said.  He  simply  does  not  enter  on  it. 

But  not  the  less  Professor  Whitehead  declares  emphatic- 
ally that  the  theory  of  relativity,  with  the  general  results 
of  which  he  is  in  agreement,  is  in  reality  wholly  consistent 
with  this  view,  and  has  nothing  to  do  with  any  merely 
subjective  interpretation.  If  the  relations  between  event- 
particles  are  looked  on  as  mere  formulas  in  which  we 
express  the  characters  of  the  space  and  time  our  minds  have 
adopted,  they  are  of  a  subjective  character.  For  him  it 
is  therefore  impossible  to  attach  any  clear  conception  to  the 
Einstein  explanation  of  space  and  time,  although  he  is  in 
the  main  in  agreement  with  its  results.  According  to  his 
own  view  there  is  an  indefinite  number  of  actual  dis- 
cordant time-series  and  an  indefinite  number  of  distinct 
spaces,  and  any  correlated  pair  of  these  is  sufficient  for  the 
filling  in  of  our  descriptions  of  the  physical  universe.  We 
employ  naturally  one  single  time-series  when  we  measure, 
but  we  have  to  remember  that  the  "  creative  advance  " 
of  nature  imports  as  actual  a  variety  of  such  series.  The 
whole  bundle  of  these  has  to  be  taken  into  account,  with 
the  variation  in  co-ordinates,  if  we  are  to  measure  this 
factual  advance  of  nature.  The  differences,  when  we 
neglect  the  necessary  distinctions,  are  usually  very  small, 
and  we  do  not  notice  them,  but  the  neglect  of  them  has 
led  in  the  end  to  the  break-down  of  the  Newtonian  method. 
In  that  method,  for  example,  the  law  expressed  for  gravita- 
tion assumes  only  a  single  definite  time  and  a  single  definite 
space,  and  the  masses  attracting  each  other  are  assumed 


DIVERGENCES   FROM  EINSTEIN  113 

to  be  in  positions  which  are  really  simultaneous,  whereas 
simultaneity  may  mean  what  differs  for  observers  with 
different  time-systems.  "  The  apparent  paradoxes  of 
relativity  arise  from  neglecting  the  fact  that  different 
assumptions  as  to  rest  involve  the  expression  of  the  facts 
of  physical  science  in  terms  of  radically  different  spaces 
and  times,  in  which  points  and  moments  have  different 
meanings."  l  "  The  observed  motion  of  an  extended 
object  is  the  relation  of  its  various  situations  to  the  strati- 
fication of  nature  expressed  by  the  time-system  fundamental 
to  the  observation.  This  motion  expresses  a  real  relation 
of  the  object  to  the  rest  of  nature.  The  quantitative 
expression  of  this  relation  will  vary  according  to  the 
time-system  selected  for  its  expression."  a  Accordingly, 
although  time  and  space  are  abstractions  they  signify  real 
facts  of  nature,  notwithstanding  that  what  one  observer 
means  by  them  is  different  from  what  another  observer, 
situated  in  another  position,  will  mean.  Our  measure- 
ments when  expressed  in  terms  of  an  ideal  accuracy  are 
measurements  which  express  properties  of  the  space-time 
manifold,  in  which  space  and  time  have  their  foundations 
in  the  inseparable  dimensions  that  characterise  its  passage, 
and  are  represented  by  the  general  co-ordinates  of  which 
the  absolute  equations  express  the  functions.  Thus  space 
and  time  refer  back  for  their  origin  to  the  twofold  character 
of  the  continuum  as  an  actual  fact  of  existence  independent 
of  us,  and  are  not  of  the  subjective  character  which, 
according  to  Professor  Whitehead,  is  assigned  to  them  by 
the  school  of  Einstein. 

The  radical  difference  may,  I  think,  be  expressed  thus. 
Professor  Whitehead  holds  that  what  we  perceive  are  events 
in  their  passage,  as  defined  by  the  character  of  a  continuum 
or  manifold  in  which  space  and  time  have  not  yet  been  differ- 
entiated. These  events  we  present  to  ourselves  reflectively, 
yet,  as  part  of  their  reality,  as  objects,  and  by  a  further  pro- 
cess of  abstraction  we  come  to  relations  between  these 
objects,  which  we  determine  as  relations  inspace  and  in  time. 
But  the  basic  fact  in  our  perception  is  the  continuum,  upon 
which  our  ideas  of  objects  and  of  space  and  time  alike  are 
erected  by  us.  It  is  to  the  real  character  of  the  continuum 
that  science  must  therefore  refer  back  in  the  search  for 


1  Concept  of  Nature,  p.   192. 
*  Ibid.,  p.   195. 


114  EINSTEIN 

final  truth.  Our  space  and  time  systems  are  the  varying 
outcome  of  interpretation  of  the  contents  of  durations 
in  our  perceptions,  and  we  employ  varying  standards  of 
references  in  these  interpretations,  dependent  on  our  situa- 
tions. In  this  last  point  I  read  Professor  Whitehead  as 
not  differing  from  Einstein  materially.  The  conflict  of 
view  arises  over  what  it  is  that  we  interpret.  For  Einstein 
this  appears  to  be  a  world  of  objects  already  there  in  space 
and  time,  but  in  space  and  time  rendered  in  different  forms 
and  measurements  depending  on  the  situation  of  the 
observer.  Einstein  seems  to  think  that  what  we  perceive 
are  objects  and  not  events,  and  relations  in  space  and 
time  of  which  only  the  shapes  and  measurements  vary. 
The  continuum  for  him  seems  to  be  got  at  indirectly  by 
inference,  and  not  to  be  the  actual  basis  of  nature  as  directly 
known.  Despite  what  Einstein  says,  I  think  that  White- 
head  is  nearer  to  the  position  formulated  by  Minkowski 
himself  than  Einstein  is.  The  question  is  one  of  great 
importance  for  the  theory  of  knowledge,  and  uncertainty 
about  it  has  already  led  to  ambiguity  in  the  language  of 
some  physicists  of  eminence,  who  speak  of  the  continuum 
as  though  the  relations  within  it  could  be  described  in 
terms  appropriate  only  to  measurement,  such  as  "  longest  " 
and  "  shortest."  No  doubt  the  application  of  tensors 
has  enabled  these  to  avoid  practical  difficulties,  but  the 
obscurity  in  point  of  principle  seems  to  remain. 

From  the  merely  philosophical  standpoint  of  the  present 
book,  it  seems  as  if  that  Professor  Whitehead  is  on  firm 
ground,  in  so  far  as  he  does  not  assume  the  exclusive  truth 
of  any  particular  philosophical  theory.  The  great  diffi- 
culty, however,  always  is  how  to  keep  clear  of  metaphysics, 
and  I  am  not  sure  that  he  altogether  does  this. 

It  is  all  very  well,  when  something,  say  ds,  has  been 
described  as  "  conceptual,"  to  ask,  as  he  does,  conceptual 
of  what  ?  Mathematicians  experiment  comfortably  with 
ds,  and  describe  it  in  equations  as  though  they  were 
describing  a  "  thing."  But  the  "  thing  "  has  to  be  treated 
as  what  is  called  infinitesimal,  and  the  laity  have  been 
taught  that  infinitesimals  are  now  banished  out  of  mathe- 
matics, excepting  as  symbols  for  limiting  relations  of  order 
in  quantity.  But  if  what  is  so  symbolised  is  only  a  relation 
it  is  surely  notional  or  a  general  conception  or  interpreta- 
tion. What  is  being  described  is  what  is  of  a  universal 


UNDUE  ABSTRACTIONS  115 

character — in  other  words,  a  concept.  This  does  not  entail 
either  that  universals  are  to  be  taken  as  floating  about  in 
nature  disembodied  from  particulars,  or,  as  the  only 
alternative,  that  they  are  unreal.  They  may  have  exist- 
ence in  union  with  particularity,  a  phase  from  which  they 
are  detachable  only  by  abstraction.  It  may  be  quite 
right  to  talk  of  an  infinitesimal,  if  we  remember  that  it  is 
only  by  abstraction  that  we  can  do  so,  and  that  every 
phase  of  existence  for  sense  as  such  is  excluded  from  the 
description.  If  reality  has  for  its  form  concrete  uni- 
versality, in  which  the  object  of  knowledge  can  present 
itself  as  particular  for  sense  (either  actually  or  as 
imaged)  as  well  as  in  generality  for  thought,  and  is  in 
neither  case  severable  from  the  subject  in  knowledge,  the 
puzzle  disappears.  It  is  in  this  form  that  we  appear  to 
feel  and  know.  There  is  no  feeling  apart  from  some 
factor  in  it  of  reflection,  and  no  reflection  excepting  in 
images  with  a  pictorial  factor.  Why  do  we  hesitate  to 
accept  this,  which  is  conveyed  to  us  by  our  own  experience 
as  a  cardinal  fact  of  reality  ? 

The  answer  is  that  it  is  because  we  have  hypostatised 
the  method,  so  valuable  for  physics,  of  treating  nature  as 
self-contained,  and  so  closed  to  mind,  into  a  principle  of 
absolute  and  not  merely  relative  application.  If  what 
mind  finds  in  nature  when  it  experiences  it  is  what  is  of  the 
same  character  as  itself,  there  is  no  reason  for  rejecting  the 
method,  merely  because  it  is  one  which  depends  solely  on 
a  standpoint  that  is  chosen  for  convenience,  and  is  adequate 
only  relatively  to  the  purpose  for  which  it  has  been  adopted. 
The  difficulty  has  been  raised  by  the  assumption  that  we 
can  go  behind  the  fact  that  we  know,  and  account  for 
knowledge  itself,  instead  of  confining  our  study  to  the 
forms  it  assumes.  One  of  these  forms  is  human  knowledge, 
or  experience,  and  this  is  obviously  no  final  form.  Much 
light  is  to  be  got  on  the  reasons  why  it  is  what  it  seems  to 
be  by  the  study  of  nature  by  itself  and  of  the  fashions  in 
which  intelligent  beings  appear  in  course  of  that  nature. 
But  such  a  study  assumes  knowledge  as  the  condition  of 
its  possibility,  and  even  of  its  very  meaning.  On  what 
knowledge  is,  as  distinguished  from  the  genesis  of  the 
particular  forms  in  which  it  displays  itself,  no  light  is  cast 
or  can  be  cast.  To  attempt  such  an  inquiry  is  to  deceive 
oneself,  as  do  the  sceptics.  The  character  of  thought  is. 


116  EINSTEIN 

always  to  extend  beyond  itself.  That  is  because  of  what 
has  been  called,  from  ancient  times  onwards,  its  dialectical 
quality.  It  is  never  static.  It  is  always  reaching  beyond 
its  own  distinctions.  That  is  where  I  think  that  the  New 
Realists  have  done  less  than  justice  to  the  facts. 

If  we  approach  the  question  from  another  side,  we  get 
the  same  result.  As  Professor  Whitehead  points  out,  the 
notion  of  uniform  space  and  time  is  only  got  by  abstraction 
from  objects,  as  distinguished  from  events  in  nature.  It  is 
an  intellectual  construction  that  does  not  correspond  to 
the  facts.  For  space  and  time  systems  are  relative,  and 
in  their  character  independent  of  and  different  from  each 
other.  Still,  they  must  hi  some  way  be  congruent,  for 
otherwise  we  could  not  compare  them,  and  so  have  the 
knowledge  we  possess  of  the  world  of  nature  as  an  entirety. 
This,  he  says,  is  possible  because  there  is  one  fundamental 
factor  which  is  everywhere  and  always  constant,  the  rela- 
tion which  every  event  and  every  relation  between  events 
bears  and  must  bear  to  our  direct  awareness  of  it.  In 
other  words,  relation  to  mind  is  essential  to  nature,  which 
would  not  be  nature  apart  from  this  relation.  Nature  is 
thus  only  relatively  and  not  finally  closed  to  mind,  and  is 
far  from  being  independent  of  it,  although  for  our  limited 
practical  purposes  it  is  useful,  with  a  view  to  concentra- 
tion on  a  standpoint,  to  ignore  the  dependence.  This  we 
seem  to  cease  to  do,  however,  when,  as  we  must,  we  treat 
nature  as  congruent.  We  can  only  make  it  congruent, 
if  I  interpret  Professor  Whitehead  aright,  by  bringing  in 
what  is  mental ;  call  it  "  sense-awareness  "  or  the  fact  of 
knowledge  as  you  please.  We  are  thus  again  brought 
back  to  the  view  of  knowledge  which  is  fundamental  to 
the  argument  of  this  book.  The  distinction  of  the  mental 
from  the  non-mental  world  ceases  to  be  final,  even  for 
physics. 

At  p.  32  of  his  Concept  of  Nature,  Professor  Whitehead 
says  : 

"  In  considering  knowledge  we  should  wipe  out  all  these 
spatial  metaphors,  such  as  '  within  the  mind  '  and  '  without 
the  mind.'  Knowledge  is  ultimate.  There  can  be  no 
explanation  of  the  c  why '  of  knowledge ;  we  can  only 
describe  the c  what '  of  knowledge.  Namely,  we  can  analyse 
the  content  and  its  internal  relations,  but  we  cannot 


THE   WIDER   SIGNIFICANCE   OF   RELATIVITY     117 

explain  why  there  is  knowledge.  Thus  causal  nature  is 
a  metaphysical  chimera ;  although  there  is  need  of  a 
metaphysics  whose  scope  transcends  the  limitation  to 
nature.  The  object  of  such  a  metaphysical  science  is  not 
to  explain  knowledge,  but  exhibit  in  its  utmost  com- 
pleteness our  concept  of  reality." 

I  agree,  and  I  think  that  Professor  Whitehead  has 
shown,  more  than  any  other  writer  on  mathematical 
physics  that  I  know,  the  extent  to  which  the  relativity 
principle  conducts  us,  whether  we  will  or  not,  into  regions 
more  extensive  than  those  that  are  assigned  to  the  kind  of 
science  to  which  general  opinion  has  so  far  taken  it  to  be 
confined.  Does  the  question  at  issue  turn  on  considerations 
that  genuinely  belong  to  the  domain  of  physical  science  ? 
I  doubt  it.  An  assumption  appears  to  be  inherent  as  its 
basis.  That  assumption  is  that  mind  is  a  thing,  standing 
in  an  external  relation  to  another  thing,  called  nature, 
which  produces  on  it  a  causal  result  called  knowledge. 
The  theory  underlying  the  assumption  is  that  we  can  get 
behind  knowledge  and  explain  it.  But  suppose  for  a 
moment  that  we  cannot  make  this  assumption  in  an 
intelligible  form.  That  we  do  make  it  in  daily  life  is  no 
doubt  quite  true.  So  it  was  quite  true  that  the  New- 
tonian physicists  successfully  assumed  that  for  the  pur- 
poses of  daily  life  time  and  space  were  self-subsistent  and 
uniform  entities.  But  the  sanction  of  success  in  practical 
life,  though  enough  for  many  purposes,  has  not  proved  to 
be  in  the  end  enough  for  science.  Is  that  sanction  enough 
to  justify  for  men  of  science  the  tacit  assumption  of  the 
general  hypothesis  about  the  nature  of  knowledge  ?  For 
they  not  only  seem  to  get  into  an  impasse,  but  they  get 
there  by  neglecting  warnings  which  have  come  to  them, 
as  I  have  already  indicated,  from  various  schools  of 
thinkers  since  the  days  of  ancient  Greece.  It  is  not 
enough  for  men  of  science  to  say  that  they  do  not  wish  to 
concern  themselves  with  metaphysics,  unless  they  can 
show  that  they  have  kept  out  of  metaphysics  altogether, 
and  have  not  tacitly  assumed  a  metaphysical  principle 
which  may  turn  out  to  be  wholly  unsound. 

But  I  will  not  pause  further  to  dwell  at  this  stage  on  the 
significance  of  such  an  outlook.  For  that  significance  is 
the  underlying  principle  of  the  present  book,  its  "  single 


118  EINSTEIN 

thought,"  and  in  the  subsequent  chapters  the  principle 
will  be  developed. 

Some  of  the  pronouncements  on  which  the  various 
schools  of  contemporary  physicists  agree  bring  us  very 
near  to  that  borderland  in  which  science  and  philosophy 
approach  each  other,  and  they  fit  in  with  a  good  deal  that 
seems  to  be  light  which  the  doctrine  of  relativity,  in  the 
wider  form  which  philosophy  gives  to  it,  throws  on  the 
problem  of  the  nature  of  knowledge.  How  the  teaching 
of  the  philosopher  and  the  physicist  may  converge  in  this 
direction  is  illustrated  by  Bergson.  His  students  may 
remember  that,  as  I  have  already  reminded  my  readers, 
he  insists  on  mathematical  time  and  his  own  "  duration  " 
being  quite  different.  He  points  out  that  in  reflection  we 
always  spatialise  time  into  discrete  intervals  which  are 
constructed  in  spatial  form.  We  thus  seem  to  enable 
ourselves  to  count  equal  intervals  of  time,  and  also  coinci- 
dences in  it  which  we  call  simultaneities.  The  time-space 
relation  so  created  in  our  minds  becomes  thus  a  fourth 
dimension,  which,  because  it  is  essential,  we  tacitly  intro- 
duce and  add  to  the  three  ordinary  dimensional  relations 
of  space.  It  is  in  this  way  that  duration  is  for  Bergson 
made  to  assume  the  form,  in  reality  illusory,  of  a  homo- 
geneous medium,  and  that  the  feature  connecting  space 
with  time,  which  we  call  simultaneity,  is  introduced  as  if 
it  were  an  actual  fact  directly  observed.  A  space-time 
manifold  is  so  constructed  by  the  mind.  Questions  are 
thus  raised  concerning  relativity  to  the  observer,  arising 
from  the  artificial  character  of  apparent  simultaneity. 

But  the  name  of  Bergson  is  not  the  only  name  which 
comes  to  one's  memory  in  reading  Einstein. 

If  you  walk  along  the  promenade  on  the  venerable 
fortification  or  mound  which  surrounds  the  old  university 
town  of  Gottingen,  you  come  upon  a  curious  statue  of  two 
men.  One  is  a  physicist  kneeling  by  a  model  repre- 
senting wave  motion  along  lines,  the  form  of  which  he  is 
apparently  trying  to  explain  to  himself  and  to  interpret 
as  exemplifying  some  general  law.  But  he  seems  puzzled, 
and  he  looks  upward  to  another  figure  bending  over  him, 
and  apparently  suggesting  a  solution  for  his  difficulty. 
The  second  figure  is  that  of  a  man  of  very  striking  appear- 
ance. The  face  is  a  highly  intellectual  one,  and  the  expres- 
sion, though  grim,  suggests  immense  power  of  mind.  It  is 


GOTTINGEN  AND   GAUSS  119 

that  of  Gauss  standing  over  his  colleague  Weber,  to  whom 
he  looks  as  though  he  were  suggesting  the  solution  of  some 
mathematical  difficulty  which  is  perplexing  the  latter.  It 
is  impressive  for  those  who  believe,  not  only  in  the 
boundlessness  of  the  range  of  abstract  science,  but  in  the 
continuous  development  of  great  principles  when  once 
established,  to  observe  that  methods  devised  by  the  insight 
of  Gauss,  seventy  years  ago,  should  still  serve  men  like 
Einstein  to-day  in  a  fresh  domain.  For  Gauss  discovered 
a  mathematical  scheme  which  remains  still  appropriate 
for  expressing  to-day  in  the  generality,  unrivalled  in  its 
kind,  of  mathematical  language,  the  relation  to  each  other 
of  the  points  in  any  sort  of  space  that  has  to  be  defined 
and  measured.  As  many  co-ordinates,  which  may  be 
either  straight  or  curved  as  is  required,  are  assigned  to 
each  point  as  the  continuum  has  dimensions.  The  method 
of  Gauss  was  so  devised  as  to  be  capable  of  application  in 
what  is  called  non-Euclidean  geometry  as  well  as  in 
Euclidean,  and  it  could  be  so  adapted  as  to  include  among 
its  co-ordinates  one  to  represent  time.  The  general  laws 
of  the  new  version  of  physics,  as  Einstein  has  proposed  it, 
thus  finds  a  convenient  mode  of  expression  in  the  method 
proposed  by  Gauss  for  dealing  with  space  in  its  most 
general  features  and  possibilities  many  years  before 
Einstein's  version  was  dreamed  of. 

It  is  interesting  to  remember  how  the  way  was  thus, 
nearly  three-quarters  of  a  century  since,  prepared  for 
thinkers  like  Einstein  and  the  interpreters  of  the  doctrine 
of  quantitative  relativity.  Gauss  must  have  possessed 
one  of  the  most  extraordinary  mathematical  intellects 
that  has  appeared  since  Newton  died.  His  genius  enabled 
him  to  anticipate  ideas  which  were  to  mature  only  long 
after  his  time.  He  had  the  gift  of  overcoming  mathe- 
matical difficulties  which  seemed  insuperable  to  others  of 
his  own  period.  He  was  a  man,  too,  of  resolute  character 
in  carrying  out  his  ideas.  It  is  recorded  of  him  that  when 
he  wished  to  bring  to  the  test  his  doubts  as  to  whether 
geometry  had  more  than  an  empirical  character,  he 
insisted  on  measuring  with  theodolites  the  angles  which 
three  rays  of  light,  emitted  from  three  high  points  in 
Germany,  the  Brocken,  the  Hoher  Hagen,  and  the  Insel- 
berg,  made  with  each  other.  The  purpose  was  to  deter- 
mine experimentally  whether  the  angles  of  a  very  large 


120  EINSTEIN 

triangle  actually  amounted  to  two  right  angles.  In  the 
Chair  of  Mathematics  which  he  held  at  Gottingen,  a 
university  distinguished,  like  Cambridge  in  our  own 
country,  as  the  home  of  a  series  of  great  mathematicians, 
Gauss  was  succeeded  after  a  brief  interval  by  Riemann. 
The  latter  died  young,  but  his  was  a  genius  second 
only,  if  indeed  second,  to  that  of  Gauss.  Between  them 
they  evolved  much  of  the  foundation  of  the  difficult 
mathematical  methods  which  Einstein  was  to  develop 
still  more  fully  later  on,  methods  which  are  not  the 
less  difficult  because  they  conduct  those  who  apply 
them  into  that  border  country  of  which  I  have  already 
spoken. 

But  Gauss  and  Riemann  were  not  the  only  teachers  at 
Gottingen  who  were  pioneers  in  laying  the  mathematical 
foundations  of  the  principle  of  relativity.  Hermann 
Minkowski  was  professor  there  from  1902  to  1909.  He  it 
was  who  saw  more  clearly  than  any  before  his  day  that 
space  and  time  were  inseparable,  and,  taken  by  them- 
selves, could  be  regarded  as  mere  abstractions  from  a 
continuum  which  possessed  the  fundamental  character 
of  both  in  indissoluble  union.  The  form  of  activity  in 
this  continuum  he  named  the  "  world-line." 

Like  Riemann,  Minkowski  was  a  man  of  genius  who  died 
young.  He  was  born  in  1864.  Very  early  his  published 
papers  attracted  attention,  and  a  Chair  was  founded  for 
him  at  Gottingen.  He  died  in  1909,  having  left  a  reputa- 
tion behind  him  nearly  comparable  to  that  left  by 
Riemann.  His  most  famous  contribution  to  the  literature 
o£  relativity  was  the  address  he  delivered,  under  the  title 
Raum  und  Zeit,  at  Cologne  on  the  21st  of  September  1908, 
before  a  scientific  congress.  In  this  address  he  announced 
his  conviction  that  at  the  basis  of  experience  lay,  not 
space,  but  an  infinite  variety  of  space -systems,  and  that 
the  foundational  reality  for  physics  was  a  "  world-line," 
in  which  the  truth  of  the  phenomenal  world  must  be  looked 
for  as  a  four -dimensional  world  from  which  space  and  time 
must  be  taken  as  arbitrary  and  derivative  constructions. 
Everything  turns  on  what  we  mean  by  rest,  and  this 
depends  on  how  we  determine  arbitrarily  our  space  and 
time  in  observation.  Three-dimensional  geometry  becomes 
a  mere  chapter  in  the  book  of  four -dimensional  physics. 
Space  and  time,  as  Newton  conceived  them,  sink  down  to 


CONCLUSION  OF  THIS  CHAPTER  121 

a  new  and  lower  status  as  mere  shadows  of  the  one  four- 
dimensional  world. 

It  is  this  purely  derivative  character  of  the  space  and 
time  of  current  physics,  and  the  consequent  impropriety 
of  applying  language  descriptive  of  them  to  the  ultimate 
manifold,  that  Professor  Whitehead  seems  to  me  to  have 
brought  out  in  his  treatment  of  relativity,  more  thoroughly 
than  Einstein  or  even  Minkowski  himself  has  done. 

I  have  now  endeavoured  to  convey  some  idea  of  what 
relativity  in  measurement  appears  to  import  for  philo- 
sophy. The  sketch  I  have  made  is  one  only  of  outline, 
but  it  will  serve  as  an  introduction  to  applications  of  the 
principle,  in  more  general  forms  than  those  that  are 
mathematical  or  physical,  in  the  discussion  which  follows. 

Physical  relativity  must  not  be  looked  on  to-day  as 
more  than  the  beginning  of  a  new  outlook  for  mathema- 
ticians and  physicists.  The  doctrine  has  much  in  its 
appearance  to  commend  it.  But  it  is  apparently  as  yet 
only  in  a  stage  that  is  incomplete.  Not  only  are  funda- 
mental principles  unsettled,  but  special  problems  remain 
to  be  solved.  For  instance,  what  light  does  the  new 
doctrine  throw  upon  rotation  ?  A  rotating  body  bulges 
under  what  we  call  the  action  of  centrifugal  force  which 
gravitational  attraction  does  not  adequately  restrain  and 
so  compensate  for.  Newton  naturally  held  rotation  to  be 
an  absolute  fact.  It  does  not  depend  on  relative  position 
in  the  same  way  as  motion  of  translation  does,  and  such 
facts  of  observation  as  those  yielded  by  Foucault's  pen- 
dulum and  the  gyroscope  bear  out  the  view  of  its  inde- 
pendence of  anything  beyond  itself.  What,  then,  is  the 
significance  of  the  apparent  centrifugal  force  to  which  the 
bulging  of  a  rotating  body  is  due  ?  Does  the  principle  of 
relativity  in  measurement  of  position  and  of  motion  in 
translation  still  leave  open  the  possibility  of  some  world- 
wide inertial  frame  existing  independently  of  relative  space 
and  time  systems  ?  Some  mathematicians  suggest  this. 
Others,  like  Professor  Whitehead,  point  out  that  Newton's 
laws  of  motion  are  only  true  if  the  axes  to  which  they 
refer  belong  to  a  body  which  is  not  rotating,  and  is  not 
of  accelerating  velocity.  If  this  is  forgotten,  instances 
will  appear  in  which  action  and  reaction  will  not  be  equal 
and  opposite,  and  uncompensated  forces  will  show  them- 
selves as  in  rotating  bodies.  Is  this  explanation  one 


122  EINSTEIN 

which  in  itself  is  sufficient  ?  These  and  analogous  points 
remain  for  the  mathematicians  to  agree  on  and  explain 
to  us  laymen. 

Again,  what  is  the  character  of  the  universe  ?  Is  it 
that  of  a  universe  which  is  finite  and  yet  unbounded  ? 
Einstein  himself  suggests  this,  and  gives  reasons  for 
thinking  that  it  may  be  cylindrical.  If,  for  simplicity, 
we  start  off  by  thinking  of  ourselves  as  existing  in  space 
of  only  two  dimensions  instead  of  three,  that  is  to  say  as 
in  "  Flatland,"  then  so  long  as  these  dimensions  are  plane 
certain  perplexities  do  not  arise.  But  suppose  that  the 
two-dimensional  surface  is  not  plane,  and  that  we  live  on  a 
curved  surface !  We  shall  not  know  it,  because  we  have  no 
experience  of  a  different  kind  to  guide  us.  We  shall  then 
find  what  we  took  to  be  our  straight  lines  of  measurement 
returning  on  their  origins  in  circular  or  other  curves. 
The  curved  world  will  thus  be  finite,  although  there  is  no 
limit  to  it  to  be  experienced.  Now  a  world  with  three 
dimensions  that  are  curved  instead  of  straight  can  be 
devised  just  as  well  as  one  of  only  two.  Riemann,  Helm- 
holtz,  and  Poincare  have  long  ago  made  such  an  idea 
intelligible  in  popular  form.  Such  a  curvilinear  space 
must  of  course  not  be  thought  of  as  something  carved  out 
of  a  larger  space  of  the  ordinarily  imagined  character.  It 
is  to  be  taken  to  be  all  that  space  can  mean  as  well  as  can 
be.  And  if  space  itself  be  thus  of  a  really  curved  nature, 
then  we  live  in  a  universe  which,  if  unbounded,  is  not  the 
less  finite. 

What  the  form  of  the  order  of  things  in  that  universe 
is  we  do  not  yet  know.  Einstein  and  his  disciples  have 
only  entered  on  inquiry  as  to  the  answers  science  can  give 
to  the  questions  raised.  So  far  they  are  able  to  do  little 
more  than  reveal  to  us  unlimited  possibilities  of  truth 
attainable  by  reflection.  But  at  least  they  have  helped 
to  emancipate  our  minds  from  the  deadening  effect  of 
conventional  ideas. 


CHAPTER    VI 

RELATIVITY   IN   EXPERIENCE   GENERALLY 

EINSTEIN'S  principle  of  the  relativity  of  our  measurements 
in  space  and  time  cannot  be  taken  in  isolation.  When 
its  import  is  considered  it  may  well  be  found  to  have  its 
counterpart  in  other  domains  of  nature  and  of  knowledge 
generally.  Before  we  enter  on  this  question  let  us  be  clear 
as  to  what  the  relativity  principle  in  physics  has  brought 
us.  We  may  define  it  as  Einstein  himself  has  done,  or 
with  the  greater  freedom  exhibited  in  Professor  Eddington's 
book,  and  also  in  German  expositions  such  as  that  of 
Schlick.  Or  we  may  give  to  the  principle  the  more  objec- 
tive interpretation  reached  by  Professor  Whitehead,  who 
is  very  definite  in  rejecting  anything  like  a  tendency  to 
split  externality  into  two  phases,  one  that  of  the  space-time 
continuum  and  the  other  that  of  space  and  time  systems 
as  they  actually  occur  in  an  independent  experience. 
There  is  a  broad  feature  which  all  the  different  views  exhibit 
in  common.  Into  the  results  apparently  yielded  by  direct 
sense-awareness  concepts  have  not  only  entered,  but  have 
entered  with  transforming  power. 

Our  biological  notion  of  our  organisms  as  percipient 
make  this  in  practice  difficult  to  visualise.  We  think  of 
our  sensations  as  originating  in  the  contact  of  the  afferent 
extremities  of  our  nerves  with  something  in  the  environ- 
ment independent  of  the  organism.  It  is  thus  that  our 
knowledge  of  the  external  world  seems  to  have  reality  and 
independence.  It  is  therefore,  on  this  hypothesis,  some- 
what unintelligible  to  suppose  that  concepts  can  enter 
into  that  reality  and  independence.  For  concepts  look  as 
though  they  were  essentially  creatures  of  mere  reflection, 
always  general  and  applicable  to  an  infinity  of  singulars 
indifferently.  They  are  not  happenings  in  time  and 
space  but  identities  in  mode  of  apprehension.  If  the 

123 


124      RELATIVITY  IN  EXPERIENCE   GENERALLY 

biological  view  of  knowledge  be  the  final  one  they  cannot 
really  enter  into  the  particularism  of  reality  in  sense- 
perception. 

But  the  biological  view  of  the  organism  as  a  thing 
receiving  impressions  from  its  environment  in  truth  pre- 
supposes the  vision  of  an  entire  world  within  which  the 
receiver,  the  receiving,  and  the  received  have  already  the 
places  presupposed  by  the  necessities  of  the  process.  A 
biological  epistemology  can  therefore  only  possess  relative 
truth.  It  can  no  more  account  for  our  knowledge  of  that 
world,  which  it  has  already  in  its  explanation  assumed 
to  be  there,  than  can  the  classical  notion  of  space  and  time 
as  absolute  account  for  facts  of  observation  which  modern 
physics  has  placed  beyond  doubt  and  which  yet  appear  to  be 
irreconcilable  with  that  notion.  Its  case  is  indeed  a  much 
worse  one,  for  it  cannot  account  even  for  itself.  We  are 
thus  driven  back  to  the  revision  of  our  popular  idea  of  the 
relation  of  the  biological  thing  to  its  environment  as  an 
explanation  of  knowledge.  As  we  shall  find  in  more  detail 
later  on,  knowledge  cannot  be  thus  explained.  It  is  itself 
presupposed,  even  when  we  distinguish  a  particular  sensa- 
tion from  a  concept.  The  distinction  between  the  two  falls 
within  knowledge  itself  and  presupposes  it.  Only  for 
the  sake  of  convenience  do  we  refer  to  sensations  apart 
from  concepts  or  concepts  apart  from  sensations.  When 
we  do  this  it  is  for  a  reason  analogous  to  that  for  which  the 
mathematician  permits  himself  to  talk  of  infinitesimals, 
and  to  calculate  with  them  as  though  they  expressed  more 
than  mere  relations. 

It  is  therefore  not  surprising  that  the  theory  of  rela- 
tivity should  be  considered  to  have  shown  that  the  reality 
of  a  world  of  space  and  time  can  only  be  stated  in  terms  of 
concepts.  For  what  we  call  nature  turns  out  to  have  been 
permeated  by  the  activity  of  reflection.  It  is  interesting  to 
notice  how  this  conclusion  presents  itself  to  the  minds  of 
men  of  science  themselves.  Professor  Eddington,  who  is 
both  an  acute  and  a  courageous  thinker,  uses  these  remark- 
able words  at  p.  197  of  his  book,  towards  its  conclusion : 

"  Our  whole  theory  has  really  been  a  discussion  of  the 
most  general  way  in  which  permanent  substance  can  be 
built  up  out  of  relations ;  and  it  is  the  mind  which,  by 
insisting  on  regarding  only  the  things  that  are  permanent, 


CAUSES  CONTRASTED  WITH   ENDS  125 

has  actually  imposed  these  laws  on  an  indifferent  world. 
Nature  has  had  very  little  to  do  with  the  matter  ;  she  had 
to  provide  a  basis — point-events  ;  but  practically  any- 
thing would  do  for  that  purpose  if  the  relations  were  of  a 
reasonable  degree  of  complexity.  The  relativity  theory 
of  physics  reduces  everything  to  relations  ;  that  is  to  say, 
it  is  structure,  not  material,  which  counts.  The  structure 
cannot  be  built  up  without  material ;  but  the  nature  of 
the  material  is  of  no  importance." 

Professor  Whitehead  would  hardly  accept  this  inter- 
pretation of  the  relativity  doctrine,  but  we  have  seen  that 
there  is  reason  to  regard  him  as  proceeding  in  the  same 
direction  by  another  path.  However,  therefore,  we  look 
at  it,  the  theory  of  relativity  in  physical  measurement 
means  this,  that  our  measurements  are  what  they  are 
because  of  the  concepts  through  which  knowledge  effects 
them.  Whether  these  concepts  assume  the  form  of  co- 
ordinates, such  as  those  which  are  harmonised  by  the 
Lorentz  equations  for  transformation  used  for  the  earlier 
or  special  principle  of  relativity,  or  whether  they  are  the 
"  Tensors,"  which  have  been  adapted  by  Einstein  for 
the  measurement  of  the  continuum  in  its  relation  to  forms 
of  every  order  in  the  actual  space  and  time  of  our  experi- 
ence, we  come  to  the  same  result.  It  is  through  general 
principles,  and  not  by  immediate  awareness  in  its  sim- 
plicity, that  we  get  our  knowledge  of  physical  nature,  and 
the  reality  we  discover  is  of  an  order  in  character  the  same 
as  that  of  our  knowledge  about  it. 

It  is  of  special  importance  that  this  should  have  come  out 
so  clearly  in  physics,  the  science  which  is  concerned  with 
nature  in  the  aspect  in  which  are  presented  externalities 
absolutely  excluding  each  other.  It  is  not  less  important 
that  in  other  domains  of  science  a  similar  conclusion  should 
prove  inevitable. 

In  biology,  the  idea  with  which  we  are  primarily  con- 
cerned is,  not  that  of  cause,  as  in  physics,  but  that  of  end. 
It  is  essential  for  progress  in  accurate  interpretation  to  dis- 
tinguish these  two  clearly.  They  belong  to  different  orders 
in  thought,  and  much  confusion  has  resulted  from  failure 
to  distinguish  their  respective  characters. 

Cause  is  a  very  indefinite  expression.  Externality  to 
the  effect  is  of  its  essence,  but  its  meaning  is  relative  in  all 
10 


126      RELATIVITY   IN   EXPERIENCE  GENERALLY 

cases  to  the  subject-matter.  For  the  housemaid  the  cause 
of  the  fire  is  the  match  she  lights  and  applies.  For  the 
physicist  the  cause  of  the  fire  is  the  conversion  of  potential 
into  kinetic  energy,  through  the  combination  of  carbon 
atoms  with  those  of  oxygen  and  the  formation  of  oxides 
in  the  shape  of  gases  which  become  progressively  oxidised. 
For  the  judge  who  is  trying  a  case  of  arson  it  is  the  wicked 
action  of  the  prisoner  in  the  dock.  In  each  case  there  is  a 
different  field  of  inquiry,  determined  from  a  different  stand- 
point. But  no  such  field  is  even  approximately  exhaustive. 
The  complete  cause,  if  it  could  be  found,  would  extend  to 
the  entire  ground  of  the  phenomenon  that  had  to  be 
explained,  and  this  ground  would  reach,  not  only  to  the 
whole  of  the  world,  but  to  the  entirety  of  the  universe. 
More  than  this  ;  if  the  ground  could  be  completely  stated 
it  would  be  indistinguishable  from  the  effect  itself,  including, 
as  it  would  do,  the  whole  of  the  conditions  of  existence. 
Thus  we  see  that  when  we  speak  of  the  cause  of  an  event 
we  are  only  picking  out  what  is  relevant  to  the  standpoint 
of  a  special  inquiry,  and  is  determined  in  its  scope  by  the 
particular  concept  which  our  purpose  makes  us  have  in 
view.  The  physicist  who  investigates  the  abstraction 
called  physical  nature  excludes  from  his  attention  many 
forms  of  activity  which  others  observe  and  which  belong 
to  a  different  domain. 

The  end  that  for  the  biologist  determines  the  activity 
of  the  living  organism  is  a  phenomenon  of  an  order  of  which 
the  special  methods  of  the  physicist  can  take  no  account. 
This  kind  of  phenomenon  also  can  only  be  reached  through 
adequate  concepts,  but  the  concepts  belong  to  a  different 
order  of  thought.  In  observing  ends  as  guiding  the 
behaviour  of  the  merely  living  organism,  we  have  not  as 
yet  to  do  with  conscious  purpose,  itself  belonging  to  quite 
a  different  order,  that  which  is  mental  and  not  merely 
biological.  The  end  is  not  the  less  quite  different  from 
a  cause.  Every  event  which  we  pick  out  and  name  as  a 
cause  we  pick  out  and  name  as  one  conceived  to  be  external 
to  the  effect  which  follows  on  it.  If  we  did  not  do  so  we 
should  be  unable  to  draw  any  distinction  at  all  as  physicists. 
We  are  dealing  with  what  is  akin  to  the  externality  to  each 
other  of  the  symbols  with  which  the  reflection  of  the  mathe- 
matician concerns  itself.  But  in  the  case  of  ends  this  is 
otherwise.  The  end  is  immediately  present.  It  operates 


CHARACTER  OF  ENDS  127 

ab  intra  rather  than  ab  extra.  In  this  respect  it  is  more 
akin  to  consciously  purposive  than  to  causal  action.  The 
parts  of  the  living  whole  behave  more  like  the  citizens  of 
a  state  than  like  the  molecules  of  a  substance.  The 
organism  lives  by  continuing  to  realise  an  end  even  through 
progressive  and  complete  alteration  in  constantly  changing 
material.  It  takes  in  from  its  environment,  and  gives 
out  to  it  in  a  fashion  in  which  continuity  is  unbroken,  and 
in  which  its  form  is  modified  by  the  fulfilment,  not  of  some 
external  law,  but  of  a  law  which  it  appears  to  impose  on 
itself.  Its  change  of  form  takes  place  in  accordance  with 
characteristics  which  it  inherits,  and  which  cannot  be 
adequately  expressed  in  mathematical  or  physical  terms, 
and  its  whole  life  is  one  which  is  self-determined  in  a  develop- 
ment or  behaviour  taking  place  in  the  interests  of  the 
species  to  which  it  belongs,  and  to  subserve  the  ends  for 
which  it  comes  into  existence  and,  after  it  has  run  its 
course,  dies.  It  is  only  in  terms  of  life  itself  that  life  can 
be  expressed,  and  these  terms  lie  outside  the  words  which 
the  physicist  has  to  employ.  Of  course  physical  and 
chemical  conceptions  have  great  value  in  the  observation 
of  the  organism.  They  are  needed  in  order  to  interpret 
certain  aspects  of  the  taking  in  and  giving  out  of  its  energy, 
aspects  which  it  presents  in  common  with  the  other  objects 
of  external  nature.  But  such  aspects  are  never  adequate 
to  the  full  reality.  They  are  not  more  than  abstractions, 
under  which  that  reality  can  be  properly  regarded  only 
if  it  is  remembered  that  in  them  no  complete  or  even 
sufficient  account  of  life  is  ever  given.  An  end  operates 
quite  differently  from  a  cause.  Its  activity  is  a  present 
activity,  behaviour  and  not  causation.  Our  knowledge 
about  it  is  determined  by  an  entirely  different  set  of 
conceptions. 

But  just  as  relativity  is  the  characteristic  of  the  concep- 
tions of  the  physicist,  so  is  relativity  characteristic  of  those 
of  the  biologist.  When  we  pass  to  the  order  of  phenomena 
that  are  mental,  such  as  those  of  the  animal  that  consciously 
reflects  and  carries  out  a  defined  purpose,  we  have  something 
before  us  that  is  of  an  order  in  thought  different  both  in 
logic  and  in  fact.  In  the  organism  the  end  is  never  realised 
perfectly.  The  contingency  that  is  so  prominent  a  feature 
of  nature  seems  to  contend  with  it.  Even  in  the  living 
human  being  disease  and  physical  feebleness  interfere 


128      RELATIVITY   IN   EXPERIENCE  GENERALLY 

with  his  life.  They  impede  the  lowly  and  the  great 
alike : 

"  What  hand  and  brain  went  ever  paired, 
What  heart  at  once  conceived  and  dared." 

But  not  the  less  the  distinctive  quality  of  mind  is  to  be  free 
and  self- determining.  To  this  subject  we  shall  have  to 
return  later  on,  when  we  consider  how  mind  expresses  itself 
in  external  form.  For  the  moment  it  is  enough  to  say  that 
thought  as  such  is  not  only  incapable  of  restraint  save  by 
itself,  but  is  untrammelled  by  the  physical  limits  which 
confine  the  organism  in  sensation.  It  is  of  the  nature  of 
mind  that  the  entirety  should  be  implicitly  present  in 
every  detail  of  its  activity.  The  whole  is  in  the  part  and 
the  part  in  the  whole,  in  a  fashion  which  has  nothing  quite 
resembling  it  in  the  phenomena  that  belong  to  the  domain 
of  biology.  Every  thought,  however  trivial,  really  implies 
the  whole  of  our  mental  content. 

In  what  sense  mind  is  to  be  treated  as  relative  in  know- 
ledge we  shall  see  in  time.  For  the  present  I  will  only  say 
that  knowledge  discloses  itself  as  of  degrees  and  at  levels 
which  are  determined  by  the  character  of  the  concepts  it 
employs.  But  these  degrees  and  levels  imply  each  other. 
They  are  not  distinct  entities  apart.  They  are  all  of  them 
required  for  the  interpretation  of  the  full  character  of  reality. 
To  them  one  may  apply  an  observation  which  Professor 
Eddington  makes  at  p.  82  of  his  book  about  nature : 

"  We  have  neither  the  vocabulary  nor  the  imagination 
for  a  description  of  absolute  properties  as  such.  All 
physical  knowledge  is  relative  to  space  and  time  partitions  ; 
and  to  gain  an  understanding  of  the  absolute  it  is  neces- 
sary to  approach  it  through  the  relative.  The  absolute 
may  be  defined  as  a  relative  which  is  always  the  same,  no 
matter  what  it  is  relative  to.  Although  we  think  of 
it  as  self- existing,  we  cannot  give  it  a  place  in  our  know- 
ledge without  setting  up  some  dummy  to  relate  it  to." 

In  the  same  fashion,  if  we  wish  to  get  at  the  ultimate 
character  of  the  knowledge  that  is  foundational  of  reality, 
we  must  take  account  of  all  the  degrees  and  levels  at  which 
it  appears  and  interpret  them  according  to  their  places  in 
the  entirety. 


RELATIVITY   IN   CONCEPTION  129 

We  may  now  turn  to  the  general  field  of  knowledge  in 
order  to  see  whether  it  accords  with  the  principle  of 
relativity  to  which  an  extended  meaning  is  thus  given. 
In  later  chapters  we  shall  have  to  approach  the  subject 
in  more  detail.  For  the  present  it  will  be  enough  if  we 
find  that  the  characteristics  of  our  experience  are  such  as 
to  require  investigation  from  the  point  of  view  just 
indicated  in  outline. 

It  is  to  be  regretted  that  the  title  "  theory  of  relativity  " 
was  ever  appropriated  to  the  extent  it  has  been  for  Ein- 
stein's doctrine,  just  as  if  it  belonged  to  that  doctrine  in 
a  special  way.  What  he  is  concerned  with  is  relativity 
in  measurement  in  space  and  time  only,  and  relativity 
extends  to  other  forms  of  knowledge  as  much  as  to  that 
merely  concerned  with  quantitative  order.  The  different 
orders  in  experience  appear  to  imply,  as  determining 
their  meanings,  conceptions  of  characters  logically  diverse, 
like  those  of  mechanism,  of  life,  of  instinct,  and  of  con- 
scious intelligence.  The  principle  of  relativity  applies  to 
all  standpoints  determined  by  conceptions  appropriate 
indeed  to  particular  orders  of  knowledge,  but  thereby  of  a 
limiting  character.  It  seems  therefore  accurate  to  regard 
quantitative  relativity  as  only  a  special  illustration  of  a 
wider  principle. 

I  thought  it  well  to  begin  with  the  Einstein  theory  in 
its  general  features,  because  that  theory  reminds  us  admir- 
ably of  the  profound  extent  to  which  we  may  all  of  us  be 
shown  to  have  submitted  unconsciously  to  the  rule  of 
what  is  only  relatively  true.  It  may  well  be  likely,  even 
if  Einstein  is  right,  that  we  shall  continue  for  a  long  time 
to  talk  about  weight  and  gravitation  influenced  by  old 
conventionalities.  It  may  happen  that  the  man  in  the 
street  will  hardly  cease  to  resent  the  notion  that  when  his 
umbrella  falls  from  his  hand  into  the  mud,  what  has  in 
truth  happened  is  such  that  he  and  the  pavement  may 
be  treated  as  moving  with  accelerating  energy  in  an 
upward  direction,  while  the  umbrella,  having  no  acceler- 
ating push  communicated  to  it,  remains  unaccelerated 
until  the  moving  pavement  hits  it.  He  may  stick  firmly 
to  his  familiar  co-ordinates  and  system  of  reference.  But 
science  cannot  stand  still  to  listen  to  his  remonstrances, 
and  for  physics  it  is  possible  that  a  time  may  arrive  when 
even  the  good  old  name  gravitation  will  not  be  discover- 


130      RELATIVITY   IN  EXPERIENCE  GENERALLY 

able  in  any  respectable  textbook.  Science  has  been  able 
to  place  to  its  credit  in  the  past  revolutionary  victories 
not  less  confusing.  After  all  Galileo  and  Einstein  have 
been  the  authors  of  commotions  nearly  equally  impres- 
sive, and  now  every  child  at  school  thinks  easily  in 
Galilean  co-ordinates  in  a  fashion  which  would  have 
confounded  even  the  learned  of  an  earlier  and  Ptolemaic 
outlook. 

All  this  illustrates  once  more  how  closely  mathematics, 
physical  science,  and  the  inquiry  into  the  ultimate  char- 
acter of  reality  which  is  called  metaphysics,  are  related 
to  each  other.  Much  of  recent  progress  in  knowledge  has 
consisted  in  the  bringing  to  light  and  elimination  of  un- 
conscious assumptions,  and  this  progress  in  determining 
the  true  character  of  reality  has  required,  as  indispensable 
to  it,  the  ascertainment  of  the  limits  of  the  various  forms 
of  that  knowledge  which  is  ultimately  one  and  indivisible. 
Capacity  for  imaginative  range  counts  for  much ;  and  to 
art  and  to  poetry  science  owes  a  great  deal  for  their  stimu- 
lative effect  on  this  capacity.  It  is  under  a  debt  of  grati- 
tude to  the  Renaissance,  and  without  such  visualising 
minds  as  that  of  a  Leonardo  da  Vinci  it  might  not  have 
stood  to-day  where  it  does.  But  if  science  owes  something 
to  art,  it  owes  not  less  to  the  investigations  of  great  meta- 
physicians like  Leibnitz,  Berkeley,  and  Kant.1  For  it  is 
men  such  as  these  who  have  done  most  to  initiate  the 
process  of  bringing  to  light  the  unconscious  assumptions 
which  have  deflected  even  careful  observation.  Thus 
to-day  it  is  largely  due  to  the  influence  of  idealism  in 
metaphysics  that  biologists  are  breaking  away  from  the 
dogmas  of  an  exclusively  mechanical  standpoint,  and  are 
boldly  claiming  to  interpret  and  express  life  in  terms  of 
conceptions  that  belong  to  the  order  of  life  alone.  We 
have  analogies  to  this  process  in  art  and  in  religion.  The 
truth  of  their  ideas  depends  for  the  mind  that  is  concerned 
with  them  on  what  belongs  to  orders  or  levels  in  reflection 
different  from  those  which  dominate  in  science.  Faith 
may  well  be  the  substance  of  things  which  science  cannot 
see,  if  its  implicit  categories  are  categories  really  belonging 

1  On  the  work  of  exploring  the  history  of  the  contributions  of  philosophy 
to  the  foundations  of  science  as  affected  by  relativity,  it  would  be  super- 
fluous for  me  to  enter.  For  this  work  has  been  excellently  accomplished 
by  Professor  Wildon  Carr  in  the  acute  essay  on  "  The  Philosophical  Principle 
of  Relativity,"  recently  published  by  him. 


DIFFERENT  ORDERS   IN  KNOWLEDGE        131 

to  other  orders  in  knowledge  and  reality.  The  principle 
of  relativity  applies  here  also,  but  even  more  sweepingly. 
The  demonstration  of  the  importance  of  the  principle 
which  the  mathematicians  and  physicists  of  to-day  are 
offering  is  helpful,  but  it  covers  only  a  fragment  of  the 
ground.  Fully  operative,  the  principle  teaches  us  that 
observer  and  observed  always  and  everywhere  stand  in 
relations  which  are  inseparable  in  logic  as  they  are  in 
fact.  The  conception  and  the  conceived  are  alike  embraced 
within  a  greater  and  foundational  actuality.  Behind 
knowledge  we  cannot  penetrate  in  our  search  for  reality. 
But  knowledge  is  not  always  of  the  same  kind.  There 
are  everywhere  in  it  what  are  analogous  to  the  differing 
frames  of  reference  of  the  physicist.  The  degrees  or 
stages  in  knowledge  generally,  as  distinguished  from  that 
of  measurement,  are  even  less  reducible  to  each  other's 
terms  than  these  "  frames,"  for  every  form  of  the  latter 
can  be  expressed  in  the  terms  of  a  calculus.  But  life 
cannot,  as  we  shall  see,  be  expressed  in  terms  of  mechanism, 
or  intelligence  in  terms  of  life.  The  orders  in  thought  are 
of  logically  different  kinds,  and  they  have  no  relation 
analogous  to  equivalence  in  quantitative  order. 

The  importance  of  beginning  the  consideration  of  the 
whole  subject  with  the  principle  of  the  relativity  of 
measurement  lay  in  this,  that  in  mathematical  physics 
we  have  a  demonstration  that  is  convincing  by  its  justifi- 
cation from  the  use  of  external  standards.  There  we  are 
dealing  with  what  we  can  see  or  touch,  to  the  extent  that 
we  start  in  every  case  from  results  given  by  the  clock  or 
the  balance  and  the  measuring  rod,  and  in  the  end  return 
to  them  as  our  tests.  The  co-ordinates  of  our  systems  of 
reference  depend  on  what  presents  itself  as  direct  experi- 
ence of  relaions  in  space  and  time. 

But  in  the  case  of  knowledge  in  other  forms  the  primary 
reference  is  to  standards  of  a  wholly  different  order.  The 
reference  in  our  experience  of  the  living  organism  is  to  a 
whole  that  has  no  existence  outside  of  or  apart  from  the 
members  in  which  it  realises  itself,  and  in  so  realising 
itself  controls  them.  They  have  no  existence  as  living 
members  excepting  in  and  through  it.  Means  and  end  do 
not  fall  asunder ;  there  is  no  feature  resembling  action  at 
a  distance,  nor  is  that  whole  in  the  conservation  of  which 
life  consists  any  cause  distinguishable  as  an  event  apart 


132      RELATIVITY   IN  EXPERIENCE  GENERALLY 

in  space  or  time  from  the  results  of  its  self-conservation 
in  its  organs.  To  be  organic  imports  the  fulfilment  of  an 
end.  That  end  is  in  mere  life  no  conscious  purpose.  It  is 
a  final  and  self-contained  form  of  reality.  But  it  is  that 
in  the  light  of  which  the  living  organism  is  recognised  as 
being  such,  and  is  interpreted.  In  this  significance  it 
belongs  to  reality,  and  without  it  such  reality  would  not 
be.  Mind  finds  meaning  for  itself  in  it  in  a  form  and  at 
a  level  which  is  just  thus  describable  and  only  so  describ- 
able.  For  it  is  a  form  which  is  ultimate.  It  belongs  to 
the  actual  and  is  not  resoluble  into  the  conceptions  which 
lie  at  the  foundation  of  less  concrete  forms  of  our  experi- 
ence. Like  the  co-ordinates  of  the  physicist  it  is  a  con- 
ception of  reflection,  and  a  conception  that  is  foundational, 
but  only  to  what  is  known  through  it  and  as  disclosing  it 
in  actual  existence. 

In  this  respect  there  is  a  real  analogy  between  the  system 
of  reference  of  the  physicist  and  that  of  the  biologist.  But 
the  reference  of  the  latter  is  not  to  an  external  standard, 
as  in  the  case  of  the  former,  although  the  reference  is  in 
both  cases  conceptual.  The  difference  is  that  the  con- 
ceptions belong  to  different  stages  in  the  forms  in  which 
mind  recognises  its  own  character  in  its  object. 

Mind,  in  the  fullest  meaning,  the  meaning  in  which  it 
is  foundational  to  reality,  thus  discloses  irself  at  a  variety 
of  levels  which  we  shall  have  to  consider  as  we  proceed. 
It  certainly  imports  more  than  can  be  expressed  in  the 
terms  of  any  set  of  conceptions  appropriate  to  only  one 
of  these  levels.  It  is  that  in  terms  of  which  all  forms  of 
reality  can  be  expressed,  but  which  itself  can  be  expressed 
in  no  terms  beyond  itself.  Within  its  entirety  there  are 
various  conceptual  forms,  which  show  themselves  as 
forms  of  general  application.  As  such  they  are  disclosed, 
like  the  space  and  time  systems  of  Einstein,  as  belonging 
to  the  facts  of  reality  and  of  knowledge  alike.  They  repre- 
sent levels  or  degrees  in  knowledge  which  have  relations 
to  each  other,  but  they  are  not  reducible  to  each  other. 
For  they  are  ultimate,  alike  in  conception  and  as  expressed 
in  concrete  and  actual  facts  that  are  not  facts  apart  from 
them. 

Let  us  for  a  moment  again  approach  the  question  of 
what  is  meant  by  truth.  It  is  plain  that  it  may  involve 
more  than  any  merely  fragmentary  view  of  the  actual. 


TRUTH   IN  BIOLOGY  133 

In  all  its  forms  knowledge  is  ever  seeking  to  complete 
itself,  and  it  refuses  to  submit  to  stop  short  of  the  ideal 
which  its  nature  imposes  on  it  in  each  of  these  forms  alike. 
Truth  must  imply  the  whole  and  nothing  short  of  the  whole, 
whether  the  whole  be  actually  and  fully  attainable  by  the 
human  mind  or  not. 

This,  as  we  saw,  has  proved  to  be  the  case  in  physical 
science.  The  doctrine  of  relativity  made  the  ideal  apparent 
in  a  fashion  in  which  it  was  not  before  apparent.  We  are 
now  conscious  that  the  co-ordinates  by  which  we  usually 
measure  are  always  relative  and  never  absolute.  The 
calculations  of  the  astronomer  have  to  take  account  of 
more  factors  than  used  to  be  dreamed  of.  So  it  is  in 
pure  mathematics  with  number,  which  is  now  found  to 
mean  more  than  merely  what  can  be  counted.  So  with 
series,  which  depends  to-day,  not  on  definite  quantity, 
but  on  logical  order  in  externality.  The  old  concepts 
current  in  science  are  everywhere  turning  out  to  fall 
short  in  the  interpretation  of  the  actual,  and  we  begin  to 
recognise  that  what  we  have  been  treating  as  actually 
ascertained  facts  were  only  our  working  hypotheses, 
fashioned  sufficiently  for  the  immediate  purpose,  but 
wholly  inadequate  to  the  full  presentation  of  complete 
truth.  Every  particular  form  of  knowledge  is  relative, 
and  is  destined  in  the  end  to  recognise  the  boundaries  of 
its  own  apparent  order,  and  to  demand  that  we  should  pass 
over  to  conceptions  of  a  new  character. 

What  is  impressive,  even  in  the  cases  of  mathematics 
and  the  physical  sciences,  both  of  which  are  concerned  with 
externality  and  quantity,  is  still  more  strikingly  illustrated 
when  we  turn  to  the  sciences  of  life,  such  as  animal 
physiology,  botany,  and  biology  generally.  Here  the 
methods  of  exact  measurement,  brought  forward  for 
application  from  the  regions  of  physics  and  chemistry, 
are  no  doubt  of  a  utility  which  is  indispensable.  For  we 
are  still  dealing  with  phenomena  that  belong  to  an  external 
world,  in  the  sense  that  they  possess  relations  which 
require  such  methods  for  their  investigation.  But  these 
methods  are  not  the  only  methods  we  require  in  this 
region  of  phenomena,  nor  are  they  by  themselves  adequate. 
The  facts  with  which  we  are  concerned  appear  to  belong 
to  an  order  different  in  kind  from  that  of  the  conceptions 
of  physics  and  of  chemistry,  alike  as  regards  our  knowledge 


134      RELATIVITY  IN  EXPERIENCE  GENERALLY 

and  as  regards  reality.  It  is  only  by  abstraction,  by 
shutting  out  from  attention  certain  aspects  of  what  we 
observe,  that  we  can  employ  these  conceptions.  Their 
employment  is  necessary,  but  it  does  not  give  us  more 
than  relative  and  partial  truth. 

Thus  we  find  that  if  we  are  to  describe  intelligibly  the 
facts  of  heredity,  of  the  transmission  of  modes  of  behaviour, 
and  of  the  development  and  growth  through  a  definite 
course  of  life  of  an  organism,  from  the  union  of  a  sper- 
matozoon with  an  ovum  in  order  to  form  a  new  and  pro- 
gressively independent  organism,  we  must  employ  other 
terms  than  those  expressive  of  causes  acting  ab  extra  on 
materials  external  to  them.  We  pass  naturally,  if  we 
observe  without  distorted  attention,  to  the  notion  of  life 
as  the  self-realisation  of  what  we  may  call  an  end  as  dis- 
tinguished from  an  external  cause,  an  end  which  is  a  mould- 
ing influence  immediately  present  and  not  acting  at  a 
distance ;  an  end  which  conserves  itself  and  remains 
continuous  and  identical  notwithstanding  its  constant 
change  of  the  material  in  which  it  expresses  itself.  The 
human  organism  is  always  parting  with  its  carbon,  its 
oxygen,  and  its  other  chemical  constituents.  It  is  con- 
tinuously taking  in  fresh  substance  from  which  to  derive 
supplies  of  energy,  and  then  setting  itself  to  eliminate 
the  waste  products  when  their  function  has  been  fulfilled. 
But  it  behaves  as  a  living  whole,  self-conserving  throughout 
metabolism  and  change  of  material,  and  it  pursues  a 
definite  course,  first  of  growth  and  then  of  decay,  from 
its  conception,  through  its  birth,  to  its  maturity  and  final 
death.  The  individual  inherits  and  maintains  the  dis- 
tinctive characteristics  of  the  species,  and  when  it  has 
fulfilled  the  function  of  bringing  into  life  through  birth 
descendants  to  whom  it  transmits  its  own  capacities  and 
qualities,  it  passes  away  in  the  interests  of  a  larger  whole, 
that  species  whose  own  ends  and  whose  own  continuance 
it  subserves.  During  life  it  conducts  itself,  not  like  a 
machine,  but  with  vastly  greater  delicacy.  The  work 
done  by  the  blood  corpuscles  in  taking  up  just  the  neces- 
sary oxygen  and  no  more  ;  by  the  kidney  in  selecting  out 
and  secreting  injurious  substances  which  it  gets  rid  of  in 
the  urine  ;  by  the  tissues  in  the  metabolism  by  which 
carbohydrates  are  converted  into  glycogen  ;  these  and 
countless  other  phases  in  the  activities  of  the  living 


LIFE  135 

organisms  are  no  mere  illustrations  of  mechanical  or 
external  causation.  They  are  more  nearly  analogous  to 
what  arises  from  the  actuating  spirit  of  a  battalion  which 
has  been  highly  trained,  where  the  men  combine  almost 
instinctively  in  carrying  out  the  common  purpose,  ordered 
by  a  word  of  command  and  responded  to  as  only  a  collec- 
tion can  respond  which  is  no  mere  collection  of  individuals, 
inasmuch  as  it  forms  a  practised  and  cohesive  social  unit. 

Yet  the  organism  that  is  merely  living  does  not  really 
act,  as  the  battalion  does,  purposively  or  even  instinctively. 
It  acts  only  quasi-purposively.  What  controls  it  is  not 
conscious  purpose,  reflectively  selected,  but  what  belongs 
to  an  order  that  is  more  than  mechanical  but  is  short  of 
being  intellectual.  When  we  contemplate  the  living 
world  we  are  contemplating  it  at  the  level  of  end  as  dis- 
tinguished from  causes  on  the  one  hand  and  from  conscious 
purposes  on  the  other,  and  our  conceptions  are  those  of  a 
definite  and  special  order. 

There  are,  of  course,  many  features  by  which  end  is 
distinguished  from  purpose  properly  so  called.  The  mere 
end  is  not  the  less  actual  because  it  is  operative  wholly 
apart  from  consciousness.  It  selects,  but  its  selective 
activity  is  not  free  for  it,  and  does  not  depend  on 
knowledge.  It  acts  as  though  it  discriminated,  but  its 
discrimination  is  merely  analogous  and  no  more  than 
analogous  to  choice.  The  kidneys  keep  constant  the  purity 
of  the  blood  from  noxious  substances  with  the  utmost 
exactness  in  adaptation  to  circumstances,  and  with  a 
precision  and  delicacy  that  suggest  self-directing  intelli- 
gence in  selection,  more  than  they  suggest  merely  chemical 
processes  ;  but  they  really  effect  this  regulation  because, 
although  they  do  not  carry  out  any  conscious  purpose, 
they  are  living  members  of  an  organism  whose  end  and 
whose  existence  in  the  conservation  of  that  end  the  kidneys 
live  in  continuously  subserving.  For  apart  from  their 
place  in  this  whole  they  do  not  continue  to  live.  They 
have  a  special  and  definite  place  to  fill  in  a  community 
of  organs,  and  excepting  as  filling  this  place  they  are  not 
kidneys.  It  is  in  the  particular  end  which  they  fulfil  that 
their  life  and  identity  consist,  and  this  end  it  is  that 
requires  constant  change  in  their  substance. 

Now  the  conception  of  end,  as  we  see  it  embodied  in  life, 
is,  as  I  have  observed,  sui  generis.  Reduce  it  to  mechan- 


186      RELATIVITY   IN   EXPERIENCE  GENERALLY 

ism,  or  exhibit  it  as  intelligent  choice,  we  cannot.  Life 
belongs  to  an  order  of  phenomena  which  can  be  observed, 
interpreted,  and  expressed  only  in  terms  of  the  conceptions 
of  their  own  order,  that  of  life.  This  is  where  the  principle 
of  relativity  comes  in.  The  actual,  where  we  find  it  alive, 
belongs  to  a  level  just  as  truly  real  as  that  of  the  machine. 
The  living  organism  owes  what  it  is,  not  to  the  control  of 
mechanical  causes  operating  and  moulding  it  from  without, 
but  to  the  quasi-purposes  of  which  it  is  the  embodiment, 
and  which  are  everywhere  and  at  all  times  present  in  its 
life.  Action  at  a  distance  in  such  circumstances  presents 
no  problem,  for  the  control  is  inherent  and  has  its  place 
as  belonging  to  the  present  character  of  existence.  The 
organism  seems  as  though  its  members  were  fulfilling  an 
immediate  end,  which  is  not  the  less  now  actual  and 
immediate  in  influence  merely  because  its  fulfilment  may 
require  a  course  of  time  in  which  to  accomplish  its  full 
development. 

When  we  turn  to  the  higher  kinds  of  organism  which 
embody  more  than  life,  inasmuch  as  they  exhibit  con- 
sciously intelligent  selection  and  freedom  of  choice,  we  are 
face  to  face  in  our  object- world  with  a  yet  more  concrete 
order  of  reality,  that  which  belongs  to  mind  as  it  confronts 
our  own  minds  in  the  world  before  us.  The  intelligent 
animal,  the  horse,  the  dog,  the  human  being,  are  all,  at 
their  own  stages,  the  manifestation  of  mind  expressed  and 
consciously  directing  itself  in  the  action  of  an  organism 
which  is  thus  more  than  a  merely  living  organism.  We 
have  passed  beyond  the  stage  of  mere  ends  in  process  of 
accomplishment  to  one  in  which  differences  in  level  of  a 
new  order  become  apparent.  The  order  is  again,  in  logic 
and  in  quality,  a  new  and  distinct  one.  The  intelligent 
organism  may  in  certain  aspects  be  treated  as  a  machine, 
but  it  has  other  aspects  certainly  not  less  actual  in  which 
it  is  more  than  a  mere  machine.  Even  when  we  describe 
it  as  alive,  we  have  to  describe  it  as  much  more  than 
alive.  For  as  actual  it  embodies  mind,  and  it  therefore 
not  only  controls  but  selects  in  accordance  with  purposes 
exhibiting  values  of  varying  character,  with  qualities  that 
belong  to  self-conscious  intelligence  alone. 

A  new  and  large  problem  about  the  nature  of  reality 
thus  confronts  us.  How  are  we  to  explain  the  fact  that 
the  actual  exhibits  itself  in  orders  which  are  irreducible 


PURPOSE  AND   INTELLIGENCE  137 

to  each  other  ?  This  fact  seems  to  be  staring  us  in  the 
face,  and  recent  progress  in  scientific  research  appears  to 
be  intensifying  its  definiteness  and  importance.  The  old 
idea  that  somehow  science  was  likely  to  end  by  exhibiting 
all  difference  as  merely  quantitative  difference  is  growing 
remote.  The  principle  of  relativity  in  the  orders  of  exist- 
ence is  fast  acquiring  a  new  and  largely  extended  signifi- 
cance, going  beyond  what  relates  merely  to  order  in 
quantity  and  the  concepts  of  that  order. 

It  seems  hopeless  to  try  to  build  up  the  explanation 
from  below.  Morality  cannot  be  reduced  to  mathematics, 
and  no  more  can  life  be  resolved  into  mechanism,  or  reason 
into  mere  instinct.  It  is  safer  to  accept  what  appears  to 
be  unmistakable  fact  of  observation,  and,  if  light  is  to  be 
cast  upon  it,  to  seek  that  light  from  what  is  nearer  to 
actuality,  as  being  more  complete  in  the  way  it  lends 
itself  to  explanation,  rather  than  from  what  obtrudes  its 
fragmentary  character. 

But  how  is  this  to  be  justified  ?  Some  of  the  New 
Realists,  well  aware  of  the  difficulties,  have  suggested  an 
answer  to  the  question.  What  distinguishes  their  position 
from  that  of  the  older  forms  of  realism  is  that  they  project 
universals  into  the  non-mental  world.  Later  on  it  will  be 
necessary  to  consider  how  they  do  this.  At  present  it  is 
enough  to  refer  to  the  fact  that  they  do  so.  They  treat 
the  non-mental  world  which  for  them  confronts  the  mind 
as  something  from  which  the  latter  is  receptive,  and 
receptive,  not  merely  of  what  is  in  the  nature  of  the 
particular,  but  also  of  universals  and  relations  that  find 
their  meaning  through  our  reflections,  but  are  not  the 
less  treated  by  them  as  truly  there.  These  are  regarded 
as  independent  and  non-mental  objects,  and  yet  as  of  a 
general  character  in  relation  to  applicability.  But  if  this 
be  so,  what  remains  of  the  mind  that  perceives  ?  It 
becomes  like  a  substance  on  which  impressions  are  causally 
effected  by  other  substances  outside  it  in  time  and  space. 
Only  among  the  causes  which  thus  produce  consciousness 
and  perception  seem  to  be  the  very  universals  we  have 
hitherto  taken  to  have  significance  possible  only  as 
belonging  to  the  nature  of  mind  itself,  and  not  of  exter- 
nality. Physical  causes  are  so  extended  as  to  include 
entities  akin  to  Ideas  as  Plato  conceived  them. 

But  why  should  we  treat  the  phenomena  of  mind  as 


138      RELATIVITY   IN  EXPERIENCE   GENERALLY 

the  effects  of  a  cause  ?  If  it  be  claimed  that  we  come  to 
such  a  conclusion  inasmuch  as  it  is  the  only  one  adapted 
to  scientific  methods  of  treatment,  the  answer  is  that  this 
is  due  to  an  assumption  which  has  long  been  complained 
of,  and  which  modern  scientific  methods  do  not  entail. 
The  principle,  even  merely  physical,  of  relativity  appears, 
indeed,  to  impel  us  towards  a  different  view.  There  is 
for  it  no  bifurcation,  and  no  fixed  or  rigid  framework,  such 
as  the  Newtonians  dreamed  of.  There  is  rather  a  universe 
which  is  what  it  is  for  us  only  in  virtue  of  variety  in  inter- 
pretation. Its  reality  and  its  meaning  are  not  separable. 
General  conceptions  in  observation  come  in  everywhere. 
It  is  mind  and  the  significances  which  it  finds  that  make 
that  universe  what  we  take  it  to  be,  and  the  relations  of 
the  objects  within  it  are  not  fixed  or  independent  of  these 
objects,  but  are  the  results  of  our  interpretations.  The 
doctrine  of  relations  independent  of  and  external  to  what 
they  relate  seems  thus  to  fall  into  difficulties. 

At  this  point  I  wish  to  guard  against  misapprehension. 
The  equations  to  which  I  have  earlier  referred,  and  the 
relativity  which  arises  from  them,  are  not  for  the  new 
school  of  physicists  merely  individual  equations.  They 
are  inherent  in  all  experience,  and  are  conditions  that 
lie  at  its  foundation.  I  can  best  remind  the  reader  of 
this  by  referring  him  to  Kant's  teaching  in  his  Critique  of 
Pure  Reason,  although  what  he  there  said  may  prove  only 
a  step  towards  an  adequate  explanation  of  the  true  rela- 
tion of  knowledge  to  the  universe. 

What  Kant  did  was  to  insist  that  experience  was  not 
reality  apart  from  its  signification.  He  distinguished 
between  the  particular  self,  the  self  that  appears  only  as 
a  particular  object  in  experience  in  time,  and  the  foun- 
dational  activity  in  knowledge  which  made  even  this 
experience  possible.  Scrutinising  such  experience  he  said 
that  it  was  intelligible  only  on  the  footing  of  taking 
knowledge  as  being  more  than  merely  individual,  or  as  an 
instrument  used  by  the  individual.  The  object- world 
within  which  the  individual  himself  emerged  was  intelli- 
gible in  its  reality  only  if  the  individual  knew  through  the 
expression  in  him  of  what  Kant  called  the  "  synthetic 
unity  of  apperception,"  operating  in  various  modes  of 
activity  called  categories,  and  schematising  its  activity  in 
forms  of  space  and  time  which  were  imposed  on  the 


KANT'S  TEACHING  139 

object- world  as  the  conditions  through  which  alone  it 
could  arise.  In  this  sense  they  were  transcendental  to 
experience,  in  so  far  as  they  stood  for  limiting  conditions, 
but  not  transcendent  in  the  sense  of  enabling  us  to  get 
beyond  it.  The  activity  of  mind  was  thus  no  activity 
which  could  be  regarded  as  an  instrument  wielded  by 
the  individual  whom  we  know  only  empirically  as  an 
object  in  knowledge.  For  it  was  only  through  such 
activity  that  even  he  was  there  as  object. 

So  with  the  new  school  of  physicists  relativity  belongs 
to  the  very  nature  of  the  object  in  knowledge,  and  does 
not  lie  in  any  mere  employment  of  knowledge  by  a  par- 
ticular individual.  No  doubt  all  knowledge  is  in  a  sense 
relative.  As  individuals  we  are  deflected  everywhere  by 
what  distinguishes  us  as  individuals.  Our  personal  habits 
of  mind  and  even  of  body,  our  social  purposes,  the  limita- 
tions of  our  individual  faculties  of  sense-perception,  our 
want  of  mental  training,  these  and  other  idiosyncrasies 
all  hamper  us  in  analogous  ways,  and  deflect  us  from 
attention  to  aspects  of  what  is  real,  but  does  not  serve 
our  immediate  purposes.  We  may,  however,  suffer  in 
common  from  such  defects  without  their  belonging  to  the 
conditions  of  knowledge  itself.  Theory  and  practice, 
reflection  and  volition,  are  closely  related  in  the  fashioning 
of  individual  experience.  But  these  personal  aspects  of 
relativity  are  not  what  either  Einstein  or  Kant  has  had 
in  view.  What  they  have  been  concerned  with  are  the 
conditions  of  experience  in  general,  and  not  merely  per- 
sonal conventionalities.  If  Einstein's  foundational  con- 
ceptions of  end-points  and  their  relations,  and  Kant's 
description  of  the  transcendental  character  of  knowledge 
in  general,  are  open  to  the  comment  that  even  to  these 
the  principle  of  relativity  extends,  it  is  in  a  deeper  sense 
than  that  in  which  we  pronounce  the  outlook  of  the  indi- 
vidual to  be  relative  to  his  individual  peculiarities. 

How  the  great  and  fundamental  fact  of  knowledge  is  to 
be  accounted  for  is  a  question  that  is  constantly  being 
raised.  But  it  is  inherently  an  irrational  question,  for 
the  fact  of  knowledge  is  presupposed  as  ultimate  in  what- 
ever shape  the  question  is  put.  When  we  raise  points 
about  how  knowledge  is  put  together  we  are  raising  points 
about  a  foundation  which  our  own  very  questions  presup- 
pose for  their  possibility.  We  are  of  course  entitled  to 


140      RELATIVITY  IN   EXPERIENCE  GENERALLY 

inquire  into  the  growth  of  the  faculties  in  the  individual, 
and  the  genesis  of  its  psychological  forms.  This  is  part 
of  our  study  of  nature  as  taken  in  abstraction.  But 
psychological  knowledge  is  always  relative.  It  is  the 
outcome  of  the  employment  of  a  particular  standpoint, 
and  of  a  set  of  conceptions  which  can  present  what  is 
observed  only  as  it  appears  as  it  exists  from  that  stand- 
point. 

This  is  true  of  our  knowledge  of  the  particular  self  that 
knows,  looked  on  at  arm's  length,  as  an  object  in  the 
world  of  experience  and  with  a  history  there.  But  it  is 
equally  true  of  our  knowledge  generally.  Even  the  point- 
events  of  Einstein,  with  their  intervals,  and  the  appar- 
ently absolute  equations,  depending  on  co-variance  for 
co-ordinates  of  every  curvature,  do  not  present  them- 
selves as  necessarily  final.  And  going  more  widely  afield 
than  Einstein  has  done  with  his  investigation  of  the 
conceptions  under  which  we  measure,  we  come  to  the 
partial  nature  of  those  other  conceptions  through  which 
we  determine  the  orders  of  reality  at  levels  of  a  wholly 
different  kind.  There  too  the  truth  we  reach  is  not  the 
whole,  for  beyond  it  lies  an  entirety  of  knowledge  in 
which  each  order  with  its  own  forms  has  its  place,  but 
no  more  than  its  place.  To  this  topic  we  shall  have  to 
revert  later  on.  Meantime  it  is  enough  to  remark  that 
relativity  seems  to  prevail  everywhere.  That  is  because 
we  are  human  and  finite,  and  cannot  visualise  the  entirety, 
or  even  take  it  in  abstractly  excepting  by  making  abstract 
distinctions  in  our  reflection.  But  that  entirety  remains 
as  the  ideal  standard  for  our  thought.  How  art  and 
religion  bring  us  apparently  face  to  face  with  it  we  shall 
see.  But  for  thought  with  its  might,  not  less  wonderful 
because  we  think  only  in  general  conceptions,  the  ideal 
completion  is  not  the  less  present  notwithstanding  that  it 
seems  to  be  always  beyond.  We  gain  and  keep  our 
freedom  and  our  science  in  the  constant  struggle  to  be 
true  to  the  principle  which  it  imposes  on  us,  finite  as  we  are. 

It  is  hardly  surprising  that  there  should  be  a  point  of 
approach  which  leaves  the  objective  universe  to  be  regarded 
as  what  exists  independently  of  the  particular  perceiving 
individual,  and  yet  admits  of  the  application  of  the 
principle  of  relativity  in  its  widest  form.  It  has  been 
customary  to  look  on  knowledge  as  an  instrument  which 


KNOWLEDGE  141 

the  mind  makes  use  of  in  apprehension.  But  is  there  not 
a  wider  view  of  knowledge,  in  which  it  is  foundational  of 
both  apprehension  and  what  is  apprehended  ?  From  such 
a  standpoint  the  ultimate  signification  of  reality  would  be 
inclusion  of  its  "  concrete  universals  "  within  a  whole 
outside  of  which  there  lay  no  meaning  for  the  word  exist- 
ence. The  distinction  made  between  subject  and  object 
would  import,  not  a  relation  between  two  independent 
entities,  but  a  distinction  made  by  knowledge  itself  within 
its  own  field.  Knowledge  signifies,  when  so  regarded, 
not  a  special  form  of  individual  activity,  the  subject  of  a 
particular  science  of  epistemology,  but  the  ultimate  and 
final  fact  within  which  fall  object  and  subject  alike. 
Mentalism  fails  because  it  hypostatises  one  aspect  within 
the  entirety  of  this  fact ;  realism,  because  it  exalts  into  an 
independent  existence  another  aspect.  Neither  has  any 
intelligible  significance  apart  from  the  other.  They  are 
correlatives,  the  necessary  outcome  of  the  essential  char- 
acter of  mind,  always  active  and  never  inert  substance. 
Substance,  indeed,  can  itself  be  no  more  than  a  particular 
category  which  intelligence  employs  in  bestowing  on  part 
of  the  field  of  its  objects  a  meaning  that  is  of  the  essence 
of  their  reality.  The  difference  between  idealism  and 
realism  thus  disappears  in  the  larger  outlook  that  embraces 
the  difference  itself. 

The  point  will  of  course  be  made  that  knowledge  is  always 
for  us  the  knowledge  of  a  finite  individual.  No  doubt  it 
is,  but  it  is  equally  true  that  it  is  at  the  same  time  always 
more  than  this.  By  its  very  nature  such  knowledge  tends 
to  bring  itself  at  every  turn  within  a  larger  entirety,  and 
it  is  only  in  so  far  as  it  does  so  that  his  knowledge  is  possible 
for  the  finite  individual.  If  its  range  appears  narrow,  it 
is  not  because  knowledge  is  narrow  in  its  nature,  but  because 
of  the  hindrances  due  to  the  organic  form  in  which 
human  experience  finds  expression.  The  knowledge  of 
such  a  human  being  conditioned  by  his  organic  conditions 
we  call  his  experience,  and  it  is  plain  that  what  is  thus 
described,  however  much  it  may  point  beyond  itself,  is  a 
finite  form  of  knowledge.  What  is  obvious  is  that  there  is 
nothing  in  any  particular  experience,  and  equally  nothing 
conceived  as  lying  beyond  it,  that  has  a  meaning  excepting 
in  terms  of  knowledge.  And  if  existence  be  only  one  of 
these  meanings,  then  to  be  known  in  some  form  is  the  only 
11 


142       RELATIVITY   IN   EXPERIENCE   GENERALLY 

way  of  being  real.  To  be  known,  I  repeat,  not  as  if  through 
a  window,  by  a  mind  that  is  merely  organically  conditioned, 
but  as  by  mind  that  signifies  the  system  to  which  the  finite 
intelligence  and  its  object- world  alike  belong. 

Now  the  connection  of  this  view  of  knowledge  and  reality 
with  the  doctrine  of  orders  or  degrees  on  which  I  have 
already  touched  is  obvious.  It  is  only  a  world  embodying 
the  principle  of  relativity,  in  the  form  which  the  doctrine 
entails,  that  can  be  said  to  exhibit  the  character  of  mind, 
with  its  exclusion  of  disconnected  fragments  and  relations. 
The  doctrine  of  degrees  negatives  the  attribution  of  this 
fragmentary  nature  to  the  universe,  and  exhibits  it  as 
embodying  in  a  self-completing  entirety  a  plurality  of 
orders  in  existence  as  well  as  in  knowledge  of  that  existence. 
All  that  is  actual  discloses  a  variety  of  aspects.  The  living 
organism  exists,  in  ways  in  which  it  may  legitimately  be 
so  regarded,  as  a  system  of  matter  and  energy  conforming 
to  physical  and  chemical  conditions.  It  exists  so  if  abstrac- 
tion from  its  other  and  dominant  phases  is  made  under 
the  guidance  of  conceptions  of  a  mechanistic  order.  Exces- 
sive concentration  of  attention  in  applying  such  concep- 
tions gives  rise  to  the  abstract  view  called  materialism. 
But  materialism  furnishes  no  account  of  the  facts  of  life 
or  of  consciousness.  These  belong  to  other  orders,  which 
what  lives  and  knows  presents  both  in  reality  and  for 
adequate  knowledge.  It  is  only  in  terms  of  conceptions 
belonging  to  these  other  orders  that  what  is  living  and 
conscious  can  even  be  described. 

Still,  it  is  true  that  for  the  advancement  of  knowledge 
of  other  kinds  about  the  living  organism  the  abstractions 
of  physics  and  chemistry  are  of  high  and  indispensable 
value.  They  serve  the  biologist  as  mathematics  serves 
the  physicist.  The  more  abstract  the  conception,  the  more 
completely  are  eliminated  those  details  that  are  for  the 
purpose  of  the  moment  irrelevant.  It  is  by  this  kind  of 
concentration,  with  its  consequential  exclusions  of  other 
aspects,  that  exactness  in  reasoning  and  measurement  is 
made  possible  for  us  who  cannot  do  everything  all  at  once. 
And  so  far  as  the  process  extends  it  is  legitimate,  because 
the  actual  always  presents  more  than  one  aspect.  But 
the  whole  truth,  or  even  adequate  truth,  it  never  gives. 
The  principle  of  relativity,  in  a  wider  meaning  than  that 
which  is  usually  attached  to  it,  applies  throughout  experi- 


THE   PRINCIPLE   OF  DEGREES  143 

ence.  Not  that  every  object  presents  for  what  we  call 
direct  apprehension  every  possible  aspect.  A  piece  of 
iron  does  not  live.  It  has  an  actuality  that  appears  to  be 
purely  physical  and  wholly  independent  of  our  knowledge 
about  it.  And  yet  this  is  only  a  rough  working  view, 
which  suffices  indeed  for  practice,  but  not  for  science. 
The  ultimate  atoms  of  iron  of  which  it  is  composed  we 
cannot  reach,  nor,  if  we  could,  would  they  have  for  science 
anything  approaching  to  finality.  The  question  would 
then  arise  how  they  were  related  to  what  appears  to  lie 
beyond  in  the  structure  of  reality,  to  the  ideal  electrons 
through  the  energy  of  which  in  the  magnetic  field  we 
approach  to  the  constitution  of  matter.  Thus  our  piece 
of  iron  turns  out  to  be,  as  it  presents  itself  in  what  we  call 
the  actual  world,  a  phenomenon  belonging  to  knowledge 
indeed,  but  to  knowledge  only  at  a  stage  in  the  complete 
self-relation  of  its  phases. 

Taken  from  yet  another  point  of  view  the  relativity  of 
our  experience  of  the  iron  becomes  no  less  apparent.  Its 
colour,  its  weight,  its  taste,  its  size,  its  general  appearance 
might  present  themselves  quite  differently  to  beings  of 
another  kind,  with  senses  other  than  ours,  or  in  a  different 
world  where  the  limits  of  visibility  in  space  and  time  were 
different.  Relativity  comes  in  here  also.  Knowledge  is 
indeed  taken  to  be  of  the  actual,  but  then  the  actual  turns 
out  to  be  profoundly  dependent  on  the  character  of  know- 
ledge itself.  Pragmatism,  the  doctrine  that  the  view  is 
true  which  works,  inasmuch  as  it  harmonises  with  the  con- 
text of  experience,  is  often  put  forward  in  extreme  and 
exaggerated  forms.  Yet  it  has  some  justification.  For  it 
is  only  when  we  take  as  our  final  standard  an  ideal  that 
is  in  itself  never  completely  attainable  by  us,  the  ideal  of 
knowledge  in  its  entirety,  that  we  have  as  against  pragma- 
tism a  tenable  conception  of  a  final  standard  of  truth. 

Thus  knowledge  and  reality  again  prove  to  be  distinguish- 
able only  by  abstraction  made  for  practical  purposes. 
They  are  not  separable,  in  the  fashion  that  is  commonly 
imagined,  for  scientific  knowledge  in  its  fulness,  and  the 
case  of  the  nature  of  iron  is  just  an  illustration  of  a  wider 
form  of  that  principle  of  relativity  of  which  the  doctrine 
which  Einstein  has  made  famous  is  an  illustration  of 
another  and  different  kind. 

If  this  be  so  the  question  which  again  arises  is  in  what 


144      RELATIVITY   IN   EXPERIENCE   GENERALLY 

truth  consists.  As  has  been  already  pointed  out,  the 
agreement  of  an  idea  with  something  external  and  inde- 
pendent of  it  is  too  limited  as  a  standard  to  cover  all  the 
facts.  The  essence  of  truth  seems  to  lie  rather  in  the 
adequacy  to  its  object  of  the  idea  in  range  of  quality  as 
much  as  of  quantity.  Since  everything  that  is  appears  to 
stand  in  relation  to  all  else  that  is,  a  perfect  idea  would  have 
to  comprehend  the  entire  universe.  Now  no  such  idea  is 
possible  for  the  human  mind,  the  mind  that  is  conditioned 
in  that  it  has  to  work  through  senses  and  a  brain.  Our 
standard  of  truth  as  human  beings  must  therefore  fall  short 
of  this  ideal,  and  be  just  a  working  instrument  with  the 
aid  of  which  we  seek  to  travel  towards  the  interpretation 
that  is  complete.  But  the  old  notion  of  apprehension  and 
its  object  alike  as  of  static  character  has  vanished  under 
scrutiny.  Knowledge  is  dynamic.  It  is  an  effort  to 
transcend  the  apparently  given.  It  is  always  pointing 
beyond  itself.  And  with  the  continuous  advance  towards 
fuller  comprehension  the  object  itself  loses  its  apparently 
given  character.  It,  too,  is  dynamic  in  its  nature.  That 
is  the  underlying  principle  of  relativity  in  its  wider  form. 
Within  their  own  orders  in  knowledge  and  reality,  and 
subject  to  our  recognising  that  it  is  only  with  truth  belong- 
ing to  these  orders  that  we  are  dealing,  there  are  methods 
that  are  essential  appropriate  respectively  to  each  form  of 
science.  Relations  of  quantity  require  the  clock,  the 
measuring  rod,  and  the  balance  for  their  precise  ascertain- 
ment. Without  these  instruments  science  could  not 
progress.  But,  as  we  now  learn,  it  is  only  what  in  the  end 
turns  out  to  be  relative  truth  that  they  can  give  us.  When 
we  deal  with  problems  the  solution  of  which  transcends 
everyday  experience,  such  as  those  of  the  constancy  of  the 
velocity  of  light,  or  the  relation  throughout  the  universe 
of  gravitation  to  inertia,  we  come  up  against  the  demon- 
strated relativity  of  everyday  standards  of  measurement 
in  even  their  apparently  most  exact  forms.  Mathematics, 
which  can  speak  in  a  language  more  comprehensive  than 
that  in  which  the  mere  observer  describes  what  he  sees, 
enables  us  to  express  the  limitations  which  the  subjectivity 
of  the  latter  forces  upon  him.  But  not  the  less  the  physi- 
cist must  use  the  clock,  the  measuring  rod,  and  the  balance, 
and  cannot  get  on  without  them.  For  his  purpose  is  to 
acquire  ideas  that  fit  in  with  the  context  of  experience, 


APPREHENSION  AND   ITS  OBJECT  145 

not  only  his  own  but  that  of  other  men,  and  this  his 
measurements  enable  him  to  do,  because,  although  the 
results  are  limited  by  the  general  conditions  of  observation, 
these  conditions  apply  to  the  others  around  him  who  have 
experience  analogous  to  his  own.  What  he  has  to  be 
careful  about  is  to  remember  that  his  and  their  experience 
as  an  entirety  contains  aspects  belonging  to  differing  orders 
and  conceptions,  and  that  what  applies  to  its  reality  under 
one  head  does  not  apply  to  its  reality  under  another.  The 
chemist  and  the  poet  may  be  helpful  to  each  other,  but  very 
often  they  may  be  the  reverse  of  helpful. 

Now  this  is  intelligible  if  apprehension  and  its  object  are 
regarded,  not  as  independent  entities,  but  as  phases  separ- 
able only  within  the  domain  of  mind  and  as  distinctions 
made  by  it  within  its  entirety,  an  entirety  which  contains 
as  belonging  to  itself  object  not  less  than  subject.  This 
is  what  is  meant  by  speaking  of  mind  or  of  knowledge  as 
foundational.  Knowledge  is  in  none  of  its  aspects,  the 
most  discursive  reflection  or  the  barest  awareness,  a  causal 
process  taking  place  between  two  independent  entities. 
The  object  and  the  subject  that  knows  fall  alike  within  a 
single  system  and  have  reality  only  in  its  terms.  Outside 
and  apart  from  it  they  have  no  meaning.  Facts  are  not 
isolated  and  independent  fragments.  Whether  we  look 
at  the  scientific  phases  of  the  principles  of  relativity,  or  at 
the  wider  application  to  the  content  of  experience  of  the 
principle  as  the  historian  or  the  moralist  applies  it,  this  is 
apparent.  Much  of  the  confusion  of  thought  which  has 
beset  philosophical  investigation  has  arisen  from  the 
assumption  that  knowledge  is  an  independently  existing 
instrument  to  be  wielded  and  applied  ab  extra.  It  is 
not  so,  even  for  the  physicist.  Much  less  is  it  so  for  the 
historian  who,  in  order  to  reproduce  a  past  that  lives  in 
the  present,  has  always  to  re-interpret  it,  and  to  abstain 
from  trying  merely  to  photograph  imagined  fragmentary 
occurrences  which  are  not  in  their  truth  fragmentary  or 
self-contained,  but  are  intelligible  and  actual  only  in  the 
context  and  significance  which  are  brought  out  by  the  work 
of  intelligence.  The  truth,  here  as  elsewhere,  is  always 
more  than  it  seems  at  first  sight  to  be.  This  does  not  mean 
that  there  is  not  a  most  vital  and  genuine  distinction 
between  truth  and  error  and  between  fact  and  fiction. 
But  it  does  mean  that  only  by  abstraction  do  we  fix  our 


146      RELATIVITY   IN   EXPERIENCE   GENERALLY 

conceptions  of  things  in  forms  that  do  not  permit  them  to 
pass,  in  virtue  of  the  dynamic  character  of  that  which 
renders  these  things  what  they  are,  beyond  the  ideas 
of  the  actual  that  work  in  practice  only  because  they  are 
adequate  at  the  level  which  is  all  that  immediate  practice 
requires.  The  whole  truth  lies  beyond  these  working 
conceptions,  but  only  in  the  light  of  standards  and  orders 
that  belong  to  the  higher  levels  in  knowledge  to  which  it 
points  us  is  it  necessary  that  our  working  conceptions 
should  be  qualified  and  their  relativity  insisted  on. 

We  have  here  reached  a  point  at  which  we  must  no  longer 
dwell  on  general  principles,  but  have  to  pursue  the  investiga- 
tion in  detail.  It  will  be  convenient  to  begin  with  a  scrutiny 
of  what  we  find  in  the  individual  self,  and  to  endeavour  to 
determine  the  relation  of  the  self  to  what  it  perceives. 


PART   II 

THE    METAPHYSICAL    FOUNDATION    OF 
RELATIVITY 


147 


CHAPTER   VII 

THE   SELF   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

THAT  I  am  aware  of  a  world  surrounding  me,  a  world  more- 
over that  includes  within  it  myself  who  am  aware  of  it, 
is  a  fact  that  is  obvious  and  yet  extraordinary.  So  obvious 
is  it  that  rarely  does  the  significance  of  this  fact  cross  the 
threshold  of  consciousness  sufficiently  to  have  attention 
directed  to  it.  Seldom  does  the  circumstance  that  I  know 
awaken  any  question  as  to  what  that  implies.  But  none 
the  less,  if  I  do  reflect  on  it,  the  fact  is  a  strange  one.  For 
when  I  think  of  myself  as  looking  at  the  world  around 
me  I  become  aware  of  myself  as  a  physical  organism,  a 
kind  of  thing  that  occupies  a  seat  on  a  chair,  but  a  thing 
that  seems  also  to  have  an  extraordinary  property,  that 
of  exercising  an  activity  called  knowing.  This  activity 
appears,  moreover,  to  have  breaks  in  it.  When  I  shut  my 
eyes  I  cease  to  see,  and  this  confirms  for  me  the  off-hand 
impression  I  form  of  knowledge  as  a  process  taking  place 
within  the  world.  And  yet  the  world  has  no  meaning, 
except  for  knowledge  itself,  and  in  the  terms  of  that 
knowledge. 

But  at  this  point  difficulties  surge  up.  For  when  I 
think  of  what  sits  on  the  chair  and  opens  and  shuts  its 
eyes,  I  observe  that  it  is  a  living  organism  with  nerves  and 
a  brain.  And  it  seems  that  it  is  the  stimulation  of  these 
nerves  by  influences  coming  to  them  from  outside,  through 
the  eyes  and  other  organs  of  sense,  which  causes  the  sensa- 
tions that  arise  in  the  form  of  responses  made  by  the  brain. 
It  must  therefore  be  out  of  these  responses  that  I  really 
put  together  my  knowledge  of  the  world  outside  me,  not 
less  than  that  of  the  body  itself  upon  which  that  know- 
ledge depends. 

However,  this  explanation  only  lands  me  in  fresh  per- 
plexities. For  my  experience  assures  me  that  the  world 

149 


150  THE   SELF   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

outside  and  my  body  also  are  there,  whether  I  perceive 
them  or  not.  I  am  dependent  on  that  world  for  my  very 
existence,  and  I  am  dependent,  at  the  same  time,  on  my 
nerves  and  my  brain  for  the  significance  of  the  world  on 
which  I  am  thus  dependent.  What  I  perceive  must  have 
existence  apart  from  my  activity  in  perceiving,  especially 
if  this  last  be  only  the  responsive  activity  of  the  living 
being  that  is  aware  of  it.  The  activity  and  its  object 
cannot  be  the  same.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  I  find  myself 
no  nearer  an  explanation  if  I  take  the  full  plunge,  by  saying 
to  myself  that  my  response  to  stimulation  when  I  perceive 
is  only  the  effect  in  a  causal  process  in  which  the  environ- 
ment acts  on  my  nervous  system  and  indirectly  on  my 
cerebral  hemispheres.  For  it  is  just  in  terms  and  within 
the  medium  of  knowledge  itself  that  such  causes  have  even 
the  slightest  meaning  for  me.  Now  if  they  had  no  meaning 
at  all  for  me  that  would  be  as  much  as  to  say  that  they 
were  nothing  and  were  not.  I  must  therefore  go  back  on 
the  steps  in  my  hasty  reasoning,  and  try  to  find  out  at  what 
point  my  difficulties  have  commenced. 

These  difficulties  seem  to  have  arisen  as  soon  as  I  fixed 
on  the  notion  that  my  mind  was  a  kind  of  thing,  and  that 
knowledge  was  a  property  of  this  thing.  It  seemed 
plausible  to  think  of  looking  out  as  it  were  through  a 
window.  But  was  I  right  in  framing  such  a  notion  ?  Is 
my  mind  really  a  thing  at  all  ?  Is  not  its  nature  more  akin 
to  a  system  of  continuous  interpretation,  within  which  all 
that  is,  was,  and  can  be  falls,  and  is  not  knowledge  just 
such  a  system,  and  as  such  the  final  fact  ?  If  so,  knowledge 
is  quite  different  from  any  property  of  a  thing.  It  is  rather 
in  the  nature  of  a  medium  to  which  every  form  of  existence 
must  be  referred.  In  particular  it  does  not  seem  clear 
that  reality  can  be  divorced  from  meaning.  Knowledge 
appears  as  if  it  were  no  static  thing,  but  actual  only  as  a 
dynamic  process,  differing  altogether  in  character  from 
any  between  outside  objects.  For  it  creates  its  own  dis- 
tinctions within  itself,  and  excepting  through  it  and  in 
its  terms  there  is  no  intelligible  significance  to  be  found 
for  either  the  self  that  knows  or  for  the  objects  to 
which  it  is  related.  Knowledge  may  thus  turn  out  to  be 
the  prius  of  reality,  and,  like  the  Elan  of  Bergson  or  the 
"  Will  "  of  Schopenhauer,  itself  the  ultimate  reality,  cap- 
able of  expression  in  no  terms  beyond  its  own,  inasmuch 


KNOWLEDGE  A  FOUNDATIONAL  FACT        151 

as  creation  is  meaningless  outside  its  scope.  Things  and 
our  reflections  on  them  must  alike  belong  to  it.  If,  indeed, 
the  £lan  or  the  "  Will  "  is  intelligible  it  can,  in  this 
view,  be  so  only  as  the  result  of  distinctions  made  within 
knowledge  of  some  sort,  and  it  must  fall  within  it  as  its 
own  mere  form  and  not  as  reality  independent  of  it.  It 
may  then  appear  in  the  end  that  it  is  only  by  what  is  called 
abstraction,  by  a  separation  made  in  reflection  for  limited 
ends  and  standpoints  and  of  a  secondary  and  provisional 
nature,  that  knowledge  has  ever  come  to  seem  to  be  any- 
thing else  than  a  foundational  fact,  the  ultimately  real 
that  can  be  rendered  only  in  its  own  terms.  If  this  is  to 
be  so  we  shall  have  to  interpret  knowledge  in  no  narrow 
sense.  It  will  have  to  extend  not  only  to  notions  but 
to  feelings,  so  far  as  these  are  really  distinguishable  forms 
within  it.  Knowledge  is  not  an  object  that  is  for  me,  any 
more  than  I  am  merely  an  object  that  is  for  knowledge. 
No  doubt  I  can  look  into  what  I  call  my  mind  and  represent 
it  as  something  held  out  for  scrutiny.  But  in  so  doing  the 
distinction  I  have  made  seems  to  have  distorted  it,  by 
leaving  out  of  notice  the  fundamental  fact  that  its  own 
activity  is  itself  the  preliminary  condition  to  this  process. 
A  living  being  that  knows  seems  to  belong  to  an  order  quite 
different  in  kind  from  that  of  one  that  merely  lives  without 
knowing.  For  the  first,  even  though  restricted  by  physical 
conditions,  gives  meaning  to  and  has  present  to  it  the  world 
within  which  the  second  has  only  a  place. 

Perhaps  I  may  be  able  to  make  what  is  thus  being  forced 
on  me  plainer  to  myself  if  I  try  to  analyse  what  is  really 
going  on  with  me  at  this  moment.  I  am  sitting  at  a  table 
near  a  window  which  looks  out  on  a  park  in  London.  Before 
me  is  a  multitude  of  objects  quite  different  in  character. 
There  are  the  iron  railings  of  the  park.  In  front  of  them 
is  a  roadway,  laid  out  mechanically,  but  so  as  to  give  effect, 
just  as  do  the  railings,  to  human  purposes.  The  designs 
have  been  imposed  externally  by  craftsmen.  Along  the 
road  there  move  motors,  again  fashioned  by  artificers  to 
embody  designs.  Then  there  are  horses,  which  are  living, 
and  therefore  very  different  from  the  motors,  although 
they  also  draw  loads,  to  which  work  they  have  been 
trained  in  the  service  of  man.  Within  the  railings  there 
are  trees  and  plants,  which  are  living  organisms  of  one 
nature,  and  also  birds  and  dogs,  which  are  living  organisms 


152  THE   SELF   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

of  a  different  nature.  The  birds  as  they  seek  for  food,  and 
the  dogs  as  they  watch  and  follow  their  owners,  show 
something  which  the  vegetable  organisms  do  not  show, 
something  that  resembles  the  intelligence  of  which  I  am 
aware  in  myself.  Turning  my  reflection  on  to  that  self, 
it  seems  to  present  many  aspects  and  degrees.  My  hands 
and  feet,  my  habits  of  life,  my  clothes  even,  belong  to  my 
personality,  and  seem  to  be  in  some  sense  part  of  me.  And 
yet  I  am  obviously  more  than  they  make  up  by  any  process 
of  addition.  For  I  think  of  myself  as  "  I,"  and  that  it  is 
"  I  "  to  whom  they  belong,  and  what  I  indicate  when  I 
say  so  is  obviously  not  a  thing  or  even  an  event.  For 
the  appearances  of  myself,  on  which  I  am  reflecting  as 
facts,  all  fall  within  an  experience  which  is  single  and 
indivisible,  save  through  distinctions  arising  within  my 
own  reflection.  It  has  thus  the  character  of  an  entirety. 
But  it  is  an  entirety  conditioned  and  limited  by  a  specially 
important  fact,  that  I  am  the  centre  in  which  this  experi- 
ence has  its  focus,  and  from  which  it  also,  as  it  were, 
radiates.  And  I  notice  at  once  that  the  range  and  activity 
of  my  mind  in  this  experience  radiate  far  beyond  what  is 
in  contact  with  me  or  even  close  to  my  living  body.  My 
experience  is  always  in  course  of  letting  itself  be  enlarged 
by  the  thinking  activity  of  the  self.  I  throw  that  experi- 
ence into  the  form  of  a  definite  system,  and  I  rationalise  it 
through  thoughts  which  are  not  like  passing  emotions,  but 
are  of  general  and  lasting  application.  I  recognise  what 
is  so  interpreted,  a  chair  for  example,  as  harmonising  with 
my  thoughts  and  as  embodying  the  principles  they  give 
me.  I  rely  on  the  rational  character  of  what  I  think  of 
as  real  by  passing  boldly  in  reflection  to  judgments  about 
what  belongs  to  the  future  and  to  the  past,  and  to  beliefs 
that  concern  a  world  that  cannot  at  the  moment  be  seen 
or  felt  or  heard.  Just  now  it  is  noon,  and  an  hour  ago  the 
hands  of  the  great  clock,  which  at  this  moment  stand  at 
12,  indicated  11  o'clock.  That  this  was  so  I  am  certain, 
for  I  assume,  what  I  have  always  found  to  be  true,  that 
nature  pursues  a  continuous  and  definite  course  from  the 
past  through  the  present  towards  the  future.  The 
momentary  appearance  of  the  clock  I  therefore  interpret 
with  reference  to  a  past  of  which  I  have  made  an  image 
in  my  mind  based  on  this  conception.  It  has  taught  me 
that  the  events  which  I  call  causes  give  rise  to  definite 


THE   CHARACTER  OF  MY   EXPERIENCE      153 

effects.  If  the  movement  of  the  motor-cars  which  are 
passing  is  to  be  explained,  it  is  explained,  consistently  with 
the  context  of  experience  past  as  well  as  present,  by  the 
presence  of  petrol  which  is  being  consumed  in  order  to 
convert  its  potential  energy  into  the  kinetic  energy  of 
motion.  So  also  I  infer  that  the  horses  must  have  been 
fed  this  morning,  because  otherwise  I  know,  from  what  I 
have  learned  on  other  occasions,  that  they  would  be  too 
feeble  to  draw  the  waggons.  There  are  houses  beyond 
the  park  and  smoke  rising  from  chimneys,  and  I  judge 
that  there  must  be  social  and  industrial  life  where  they  are, 
although  I  cannot  see  or  hear  or  feel  it.  For  I  always 
interpret  my  actual  perceptions  as  revealing  to  me  only 
a  fragment  of  a  larger  whole  which  I  construct  for  myself 
in  reflection  through  ideas  of  general  application,  and 
knowledge  about  this  larger  whole  can,  with  a  greater  or 
less  degree  of  certainty,  be  extended  beyond  it  limitlessly 
into  regions  still  larger  and  more  remote. 

When  I  again  bring  my  reflection  to  bear  on  my  own 
self  I  find  something  analogous.  For  my  experience  of 
myself  contains  much  more  than  any  mere  particular  feeling 
of  self.  Memory,  for  instance,  enters  into  it  copiously. 
I  am  what  I  was.  The  future  presses  on  me  not  less  than 
the  past.  I  shall  be  what  I  am,  and  the  purposes  to  which 
my  will  is  directed  are  even  now  moulding  and  changing 
what  I  am  at  the  moment.  What  I  am  now  is  not  abiding. 
Yet  in  the  changing  experience  of  myself  I  remain  identical. 
If  I  am  in  time,  time  seems  not  less  to  be  what  it  is  just 
for  me.  Apart  from  the  experience  in  time,  in  which  I 
appear  as  object  to  myself  and  conscious  of  that  self  as 
in  time,  I  am  not.  Yet  it  is  only  when  referred  to  its 
focus  in  myself  that  the  succession  in  time-experience 
is  brought  together  as  a  single  and  continuous  succession. 
Apart  from  the  self  as  the  subject  in  which  it  is  held 
together  it  seems  to  have  neither  meaning  nor  existence. 
Time,  therefore,  does  not  appear  to  be  a  last  word  about 
reality.  It  belongs,  not  indeed  to  me  as  a  mere  particular 
self  or  subject,  but  to  an  object- world  that  is  there  for  me. 

It  is  thus  plain  that  by  myself  I  really  mean  more  than 
my  clothes,  or  my  appearance,  or  my  habits,  or  the  par- 
ticular contents  that  are  stored  in  my  mind,  or  their  dura- 
tion. It  is  rather  in  my  thinking  and  in  the  interpretations 
I  make  that  the  key  to  my  distinctive  nature  seems  to  lie. 


154  THE  SELF  IN  KNOWLEDGE 

Moreover,  the  interpretation  and  the  interpreted,  though 
distinguished,  are  not  distinguished  save  as  in  common 
belonging  to  that  nature.  What  I  thus  conclude  about 
myself  I  find  that  I  must  conclude  about  my  neighbours 
not  less.  For  when  I  turn  to  ask  myself  what  it  is  that 
makes  my  fellow-men  that  which  they  are  to  me,  it  appears 
to  be  really  the  relation  of  their  minds  to  mine. 

I  see  from  the  window  an  acquaintance  coming  down 
the  street.  I  have  to  go  down  to  the  door  and  meet  him  in 
a  couple  of  minutes,  and  the  sight  of  him  awakens  a  train 
of  expectations  and  purposes  of  the  coming  interview. 
What  I  felt  a  moment  ago  before  I  saw  him  is  what  I  was 
then,  and  my  present  feeling  is  continuous  with  it,  but  in 
course  of  being  changed  by  the  notion  of  the  coming 
meeting.  It  is  plain  that  my  experience  of  myself  is 
nothing  rigidly  fixed  or  remaining  the  same.  It  is  not 
static,  but  self-transforming.  What  holds  the  thread  of 
continuity  unbroken  for  me  is  that  I  am  constantly 
bringing  my  experience  under  general  notions,  notions  that 
give  it  more  than  mere  feeling  or  particular  meaning  for 
me,  and  that  I  am  so  reorganising  and  readjusting  it.  Just 
as  the  inner  feelings  that  fill  my  consciousness  are  always 
unbroken,  even  when  changing,  so  are  my  perceptions  of 
what  goes  on  beyond  my  house.  The  birds  move,  and  yet 
I  recognise  them  as  the  same  birds,  notwithstanding  that 
they  look  different.  I  know  that  there  is  a  sequence  in 
what  I  see  which  takes  place  in  accordance  with  principles 
that  endure,  though  what  they  govern  is  activity  that  is 
always  altering  its  form.  Everything  around  me  is  in 
constant  course  of  change,  in  some  cases  slowly,  like  the 
burning  coal  in  the  grate  close  by  me,  in  other  cases  swiftly, 
like  the  positions  of  the  motor-cabs  that  pass.  What  holds 
my  experience  to  identity  in  such  changes  is  their  principle, 
resulting  in  laws  which  I  recognise  as  operating  unbrokenly. 
I  believe  in  such  laws  instinctively.  I  do  not  doubt  that 
they  will  continue  to  hold  good.  Nor  do  even  the  birds  or 
the  dogs,  which  appear  to  govern  their  behaviour  by  the 
same  assumption.  Their  action  is  doubtless  mostly  un- 
conscious, but  they  act  just  as  though  they  were  following 
out  purposes  based  on  an  explicit  assumption  that  as 
things  have  been  so  they  will  be. 

Now  however  it  may  be  with  the  birds  and  the  dogs, 
this  is  for  myself,  as  an  intelligent  and  reflecting  being, 


SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS   AND   CONTINUITY       155 

a  principle  which  I  can  bring  clearly  into  consciousness. 
It  is  what  gives  their  significance,  theoretical  and  practical, 
to  my  feelings.  The  feelings  themselves  would  be  nothing 
apart  from  their  setting  in  reflection.  And  this  setting 
enables  me  to  pass  beyond  every  apparent  particular 
character  they  have,  and  to  group  them  and  connect  the 
past  and  the  present  in  an  entirety,  thus  anticipating 
the  future.  I  hold  myself  before  myself,  and  with  it  the 
world  in  which  I  live  and  which  I  look  on  as  surrounding 
me  and  including  myelf  in  it,  in  thoughts  which  do  not 
pass  with  time  in  the  way  my  feelings  and  sensations  do. 
The  most  obvious  of  these  thoughts  is  always  that  it  is  I 
who  see,  I  who  hear,  I  who  feel,  I  who  know.  The  I  that 
does  all  this  is  no  transient  feeling  or  passing  phase  of 
consciousness.  It  emerges  in  reflection  as  obviously  more 
than  of  a  particular  and  passing  character.  For  I  can, 
if  I  go  near  them,  hear  the  other  men  who  pass  by  also 
saying  "  I "  just  as  I  do,  and  they  are,  as  in  my  own  case, 
obviously  centres  for  worlds  of  experience  of  their  own. 
They,  too,  hold  themselves  up  before  the  mirror  of  self- 
consciousness,  and  in  that  mirror  see  themselves  as  having 
the  same  thoughts  as  are  mine  ;  I  and  you,  you  and  me. 
We  are  different,  not  in  the  principle  or  character  for 
reflection  of  the  varying  worlds  of  our  experience,  but  in 
the  details.  For  each  one  of  us  to  know  his  world  as  his 
own  is  what  we  do  in  common,  in  our  own  ways.  We 
cultivate  our  private  gardens,  though  we  cultivate  them 
on  principles  that  resemble.  The  self  that  knows  is  dis- 
tinguished from  other  selves  by  the  details  of  its  experi- 
ence, by  its  own  peculiar  surroundings,  by  its  history,  by 
contents  stored  in  memory,  of  which  it  is  aware  if  they 
are  reflected  on  and  so  made  an  object  for  its  thinking. 
But  at  the  foundation  of  knowledge  in  all  of  us  is  the  fact 
that  this  is  the  knowledge  of  the  person  that  says  "I," 
and  that  in  saying  so  the  person  is  affirming  that,  what- 
ever else  the  world  is,  it  is  a  world  of  which  he  is  in  some 
sense  the  centre  and  the  foundation.  It  is  for  thought 
alone  that  this  is  so,  for  no  feeling  can  be  held  up  to  con- 
sciousness, excepting  by  thinking  of  it  as  the  feeling  of  a 
mind  for  which  it  is  presented. 

What  the  facts  appear  to  disclose  is  thus  that  what  I 
apprehend  has  two  constituent  factors,  its  being  felt  and 
its  being  subjected  to  thought.  But  these  factors  are  not 


156  THE   SELF  IN   KNOWLEDGE 

distinct  processes  in  space  or  in  time.     They  belong  to 
different  points  of  view  which  are  concurrent.     There  is 
no  feeling  that  does  not  require  for  its  reality  some  sort  of 
setting  in  thought.     There  is  no  thought  that  does  not 
go  back  to  some  image  depending  on  feeling  for  its  matter. 
Thought  and  feeling,  when  we  distinguish  them,  stand  for 
us  as  the  abstract  and  the  concrete,  the  universal  and 
the    particular.     But   although    so    distinguishable    they 
are  not  independent  existences.     My  capacity  for  knowing 
and  still  more  my  capacity  for  extending  my  knowledge 
seem  plainly  to  depend  on  my  so  distinguishing.     But  it 
is  a  distinction  which  does  not  relate  to  independent  facts. 
It  is  the  creature  of  reflection.     Yet  arbitrary  thought 
does  not  make  things.     A  dream  is  in  one  sense  as  much 
a  reality  as  anything  else,  in  the  sense  that  through  my 
imagination  it  seems  for  the  time  to  present  before  me  an 
actual  concrete  world  in  which  I  see  and  hear.     In  so  far 
the  dream  is  of  the  actual.     But  it  is  reality  only  in  a 
qualified  sense,  for  when  I  awake  and  resume  the  possession 
of  my  faculties  I  find  that  what  I  imagined  to  be  actual 
in  my  dream  and  felt  to  be  such  was  not  so,  but  a  mere 
construction  by  the  mind.     It  turns  out,  when  I  try  to  fit 
the  dreamed  of  world  into  my  general  surroundings,  those 
that  include  my  awakened  mind  and  my  body  also  as 
apprehended  by  that  mind,  that  it  will  not  fit  in.     My 
organism  is  a  fact  in  the  entirety  of  my  experience,  and 
when  I  follow  out,  as  I  must,  that  experience  as  an  en- 
tirety, I  find  that  my  dreamed  of  position   in  space  and 
time  does  not  harmonise  with  what  I  now  think,  and  what 
other  people  are  thinking.     For  I  know  my  world  to  be 
real  largely  because  I  find  that  it  is  presented  to  me  when 
I  fully  apprehend  it  in  a  way  in  which  I  learn  that  it  is 
presenting  itself  to  other  people  also. 

How  do  I  know  what  these  other  people  experience  ? 
By  knowing  what  they  think,  by  distinguishing  particulars 
for  reflection  from  what  is  general  in  it.  Their  sensations 
I  cannot  directly  experience.  These  enter  only  into  the 
private  worlds  of  which  they  are  finite  centres,  as  I  am  of 
mine — the  worlds  in  experiencing  which  they  say  "I," 
as  in  my  own  case.  I  only  conclude  what  these  feelings 
must  be  like  through  inference  based  on  the  analogy  of 
my  own  feelings,  that  is  to  say,  by  means  of  conceptions. 
But  thought  is  on  mere  succession  of  private  sensations 


IDENTITY   IN  REFLECTION  157 

and  feelings.  It  works  with  ideas  of  general  application. 
These  are,  in  so  far  as  they  possess  the  character  of  uni- 
versals,  in  all  minds  literally  the  same.  Such  universals 
of  reflection  are  not  events.  They  do  not,  like  facts  of 
sensation  regarded  merely  as  events,  only  resemble  each 
other  in  different  minds.  They  are  conceptions  by  the 
"I,"  and  are  not  occurrences  in  space  or  time,  but 
thoughts  which  disclose  literal  identity  in  logical  signifi- 
cance. Reflection,  by  the  abstractions  it  makes  from 
what  treated  as  an  object  is  fleeting,  seems  to  us  to  give 
the  very  identical  thoughts,  so  far  as  they  correspond, 
which  the  poet  expressed  in  verses  composed  two  thousand 
years  before  us.  The  ink  and  the  words  printed  with  it 
on  paper  from  which  we  read  present  more  than  a  mere 
aggregation  of  marks  made  by  a  machine  carrying  out 
the  plan  of  the  printer.  What  is  before  us  is  a  set  of 
symbols,  the  meaning  of  which  we  apprehend,  and  take 
as  indicating  ideas  that,  though  those  of  another  person, 
yet  stimulate  us  into  reproducing  in  our  own  creative 
imagination  just  what  the  poet  imagined.  And  this  is 
only  possible  because  the  words  symbolise  identities 
which  must  therefore  be  those,  not  of  feeling,  but  of  con- 
ception. It  is  only  for  an  educated  mind,  exercising 
reflection  which  is  adequate,  that  they  can  do  this.  For 
the  man  who  cannot  read  or  does  not  care  about  them 
the  words  printed  symbolise  little  more  than  a  mechanical 
row  of  marks.  For  the  dog  who  chews  the  paper  they  do 
not  symbolise  so  much.  But  thought,  which  can  fly 
beyond  the  immediate  and  which  reveals  identity  in  its 
reflective  activity,  brings  before  us  the  self  of  the  poet, 
and  a  train  of  ideas  so  fashioned  by  him  long  ago  that 
they  can  set  our  own  creative  imagination  working,  and 
lift  it  to  high  levels  like  his  own. 

What  is  true  of  the  poem  is  true  of  all  the  life  I  look 
out  on  from  my  window.  I  am  constantly  interpreting 
through  concepts.  It  is  thus  that  I  get  the  belief  that 
the  people  before  me  see  the  same  sky  and  the  same 
sun  and  trees  as  I  do.  Into  their  sensations  I  cannot 
enter.  But  their  words  and  their  general  behaviour  are 
symbols  through  which  I  know  that  reality  is  conceived 
by  them  just  as  it  is  by  me. 

A  great  metaphysician,  Leibnitz,  long  ago  laid  down 
that  because  we  are  shut  into  our  own  private  worlds,  and 

12 


158  THE   SELF  IN  KNOWLEDGE 

cannot  feel  what  others  feel,  we  are  monads  each  with  a 
world  of  his  own,  from  which  the  rest  are  completely  shut 
out.  The  agreement  of  these  worlds  and  the  harmony  of 
our  actions  he  thought  he  could  only  explain  by  assuming 
the  existence  of  a  pre-established  harmony  brought  about 
ab  extra  by  a  Creator.  But  he  overlooked  that  quality 
of  thought  which  distinguishes  it  from  feeling.  Feeling 
may  be  regarded  through  the  power  of  thought  to  make 
abstractions,  and  to  hold  out  its  objects  as  though  they 
could  be  private  and  particular,  as  having  a  definite  place 
in  time  and  space,  and  as  such  exclusive.  When  we 
imagine  it  as  a  property  of  an  organism  this  is  easy.  But 
the  abstractions  of  reflection,  when  they  are  of  the  order 
of  universals  and  harmonise,  are  so  far  literally  identical. 
The  thoughts  they  embody  are  not  in  any  true  sense  events 
in  time  or  space.  The  psychologist  may  indeed  treat 
them  as  such  for  limited  purposes.  But  when  he  does  he 
transforms  their  original  and  actual  character.  Literal 
identity  in  difference  is  the  real  characteristic  of  all 
general  conceptions,  gotten  though  they  may  be  by 
derivation  from  what  is  individual  or  singular  and  so  far 
particular.  When  I  follow  a  proposition  of  Euclid  I  think 
just  the  thoughts  that  he  thought.  The  fact  that  he  lived 
a  long  time  ago,  and  that  the  lines  which  he  had  on  his 
papyrus  are  not  the  identical  lines  that  I  see  on  my  copy 
of  his  propositions,  makes  no  difference.  For  I  can  dis- 
regard as  irrelevant  and  abstract  my  mind  from  all 
differences  of  this  kind  in  accomplishing  my  purpose, 
which  is  to  reflect,  just  as  he  reflected,  in  general  concep- 
tions. No  lines  can  be  drawn  on  any  papyrus  or  paper 
that  are  accurately  parallel,  but  lines  can  be  drawn  which 
will  so  sufficiently  represent  lines  truly  parallel  as  to  serve 
for  symbols  of  the  conception  they  embody.  It  is  the 
conception  that  alone  matters  for  the  mathematician. 
He  really  deals  always  with  what  is  general,  and  never 
with  what  is  singular,  save  in  so  far  as  it  is  capable  of 
symbolising  what  is  general,  and  forming  a  basis  for 
inference  of  a  general  character. 

The  same  thing  is  true  of  my  intercourse  with  other 
human  beings.  I  now  meet  my  friend  at  my  front  door. 
His  private  and  particular  feelings  I  cannot  reach.  He 
has  an  organism  of  his  own,  and  a  world  and  a  history, 
with  an  accumulation  of  knowledge,  which  are  different 


IDENTITY   IN   INDIVIDUAL  SELVES  159 

from  mine.  But  his  behaviour  to  me  and  his  words  are 
symbols,  which,  by  expressing  meanings  created  in  his 
mind,  enable  me  to  judge  that  his  experience  has  a  corre- 
spondence with  mine  that  is  based  on  identity  in  con- 
ception and  mode  of  thought.  I  cannot  get  beyond  my 
own  senses  in  immediate  apprehension.  If  I  did  not 
possess  the  proper  organs  of  sense  I  could  neither  see  nor 
hear  nor  feel  nor  smell  nor  touch.  But  possessing  these, 
if  I  were  confined  to  them  I  should  be  a  monad  shut  up 
in  a  world  of  its  own.  It  is  thought  that  lifts  me  out  of 
exclusiveness  and  that  takes  me  into  worlds  unknown  to 
merely  immediate  apprehension  because  they  cannot  be 
so  known.  And  as  with  me  so  with  my  friend.  He,  too, 
is  a  person,  an  "  I  "  in  whom  is  foeussed  a  world  which 
he  reaches  beyond  and  extends  only  in  thought,  but  in 
thoughts  that  in  the  correspondence  of  their  system  with 
my  own  are  for  the  general  purposes  of  knowledge 
and  creative  imagination  identical  with  them.  He 
who  says  "  I  "  utters  a  word  symbolic  of  a  meaning 
which  for  this  purpose  is  just  the  same  for  all  of  us.  It 
is  to  particulars  that  we  must  look  for  the  differences 
between  persons,  particulars  which  matter  from  the 
standpoint  of  thought  less  and  less  the  more  general  the 
mode  of  thinking  is.  It  is  the  same  world  that  is  before 
you  and  me,  and  that  is  because  it  embodies  sameness  in 
our  conceptions  of  it,  conceptions  which  can  be  extended 
into  detail  without  assignable  limit,  but  are  still  con- 
ceptions. 

Yet,  as  has  already  appeared  clear,  there  is  no  thought 
apart  from  its  basis  in  feeling,  any  more  than  there  is 
any  feeling  which  is  not  in  some  degree  set  in  thought. 
The  world  of  experience  is  a  world  characterised  by  its 
implications,  implications  through  which  are  unified  the 
phases  of  the  dynamic  activity  of  mind  in  which  experience 
consists.  That  experience  corresponds  in  all  rational 
beings,  however  it  may  differ  in  regard  to  their  history 
and  their  individual  peculiarities.  It  is  a  whole  con- 
taining within  itself  the  I  who  know  and  the  entire  field 
of  knowledge,  with  the  conceptual  and  sentient  aspects 
distinguished  within  it  through  its  own  abstractions.  The 
world  that  confronts  me  is  as  actual  as  is  the  subject  that 
apprehends  in  it  its  object.  It  is  only  the  confusion  of 
thought  with  a  property  of  substance  that  has  given  rise 


160  THE  SELF  IN   KNOWLEDGE 

to  what  has  been  called  the  ego-centric  predicament  of 
the  subjective  idealist. 

But  my  friend  is  a  different  person  from  me,  and  the 
animals  are  also  living  beings,  as  real  so  far  as  they  live 
as  I  am.  What  is  it  that  makes  me  and  my  friend  persons, 
and  the  animals  separate  individuals  ?  It  is  our  own 
separate  organisms  and  their  histories  and  individual  ex- 
periences. These  differ  among  themselves.  The  organism 
of  the  man  is  of  a  higher  character  than  that  of 
the  brute.  That  of  man  does  not  merely  live.  It  sym- 
bolises a  higher  order,  that  of  full  intelligence.  This  is 
what  the  human  form  implies.  It  is  symbolic  to  us  of 
the  possibility  of  thinking,  of  remembering,  of  recalled 
history,  of  family  and  other  social  relations,  apart  from 
which  the  man  whose  organism  it  is  would  not  be  the 
person  he  is,  either  for  himself  or  for  us.  His  body 
is  much  more  than  merely  living.  It  means  all  these 
aspects  and  many  besides.  It  is  for  reflection  that  this 
appears,  and  in  reflection,  the  subject's  own  as  well  as 
that  of  others,  mind  finds  itself  actual  in  facts  that  are 
only  from  one  point  of  view  external.  The  human  body 
is  mind  in  external  form,  mind  in  the  meaning  symbolised 
in  it.  When  it  dies  it  ceases  to  present  this  aspect  or  to 
be  mind.  It  is  in  virtue  of  his  having  a  brain  that  con- 
ceives and  directs  and  remembers,  so  that  the  past  and 
the  present  and  the  future  are  brought  within  a  single 
whole,  that  man  appears  as  an  individual,  a  person  in  a 
world  of  persons.  Mind  and  body  are  not  separate  exis- 
tences in  space.  The  body,  taken  at  the  higher  degrees 
of  its  reality,  seems  to  be  mind  and  to  know  itself  as  such. 
Between  my  organism  and  its  environment  there  is  no 
sharp  line  drawn.  There  is  a  constant  interchange  of 
material.  Life  is  just  the  self-conservation  of  the  organism 
in  fulfilment  of  an  end  preserved  unbroken  amid  material 
which  is  constantly  changing.  The  intelligent  life  of  a 
person  is  something  yet  higher.  It  deliberately  makes  use 
of  and  controls  the  environment  and  moulds  it  to  its 
purposes  through  knowledge.  It  exercises  freedom  in 
choice.  It  is  so  that  we  have  our  station  in  society,  and 
the  world  generally,  and  the  rights  and  duties  belonging 
to  that  station.  The  human  body  is  thus  much  more 
than  mere  life.  It  represents  mind  and  expresses  it.  It 
stands  for  "  I,"  a  universal,  and  in  so  far  we  get  identity 


THE  ORGANISM  AS  EXPRESSING  DIFFERENCE  161 

between  one  man  and  another.  But  the  mind  so  expressed 
is  one  that  is  conditioned  by  the  body.  For  although  it 
is  the  body  in  a  higher  aspect  than  that  of  life,  still  what 
we  are  confronted  with  is  a  body  that  can  starve  and 
die,  and  that  has  a  definite  place  in  space  and  time,  and 
an  experience  which  is  profoundly  dependent  on  its  own 
nature.  It  is  only  in  so  far  as  it  thinks  that  the  body 
gets  above  and  beyond  the  natural  limits  of  its  physical 
self,  and  though  in  thinking  its  activity  is  of  a  nature 
wholly  different  from  that  of  energy  radiating  from 
matter,  still  there  is  dependence  on  the  body  as  the  organ 
of  its  expression.  For  there  is  no  thought  apart  from 
feeling,  although  there  is  also,  as  we  have  seen,  no  feeling 
apart  from  thought.  Now  feeling  implies  a  body  that 
can  feel,  and  so  does  our  thinking. 

What  is  the  nature  of  experience  ?  It  is  self-expanding. 
It  is  always  changing.  The  "  This  "  is  ever  passing  into 
the  "That";  the  "Here"  into  the  "There";  the 
"  Now  "  into  the  "  Then."  It  is  through  memory  and 
through  concepts,  such  as  that  of  substance,  that  we  give 
a  setting  to  the  object- world  as  presenting  permanent 
aspects.  The  nature  of  knowledge  is  to  fix  and  give  mean- 
ing to  particulars  by  universals  in  which  they  are  set 
and  become  realities.  It  is  well  to  have  a  term  which  can 
be  used  to  describe  the  two  factors  which  enter  into  the 
constitution  of  experience.  The  word  "  factor  "  is  not  a 
happy  one,  for  it  suggests  action  in  space  and  time,  and 
these  belong  to  and  fall  within  experience  rather  than  are 
foundational  to  it.  If  we  use  the  more  technical  word 
"  moment,"  as  indicating  a  phase  separable  in  logic  by 
abstraction  but  not  in  reality,  we  may  say  that  in  the 
actual,  and  in  our  knowledge  of  it  as  it  is,  there  are  two 
moments,  the  universal  and  the  particular.  The  actual 
is  the  individual  or  singular,  which  exhibits  both  of  these 
as  phases  united  in  the  dynamic  process  in  which  it  has 
reality.  Thus  the  real  is  always  individual,  and  is  never 
static,  and  it  is  a  concrete  universal  which  implies  mind 
for  its  very  reality.  Nor  is  there  any  thinking  that  is 
purely  abstract  or  any  feeling  that  is  not  qualified  by 
thinking.  The  moments  of  thought  and  feeling  when  we 
experience  are  inseparable,  save  in  the  logical  analysis 
which  we  are  ever  unconsciously  making  in  daily  life. 

Esse  may  be  said  to  be  "  per  dpi  "  or  "  intelligi,"  if  we 


162  THE   SELF   IN  KNOWLEDGE 

remember  that  experience  is  not  a  property  of  a  particular 
self  but  the  foundation  underlying  all  that  is,  implying 
a  self  that  experiences.  Object  and  subject  are  not 
separable.  They  are  rather  phases,  distinguished  by 
the  activity  of  reflection,  within  a  mental  process  that 
is  single  and  indivisible. 

In  such  light  as  these  reflections  bring  to  me,  I  now 
turn  back  to  consider  my  experience  when  I  recognise 
my  friend  who  came  down  the  road  to  my  house.  He  was 
for  me  at  first  only  a  moving  object,  which  I  did  not  dis- 
tinguish from  other  moving  objects  I  interpreted  as 
human.  As  he  comes  near,  however,  I  now  distinguish 
him  from  other  men,  for  I  recognise  in  him  one  whom  I 
know,  not  merely  as  a  member  of  the  human  species,  but 
as  the  father  of  a  particular  family  with  which  I  am  inti- 
mate. As  he  comes  still  nearer  I  catch  an  expression  on 
his  face  which  shows  that  he,  in  his  turn,  recognises  me. 
I  think  of  him  as  one  with  whom  I  have  had  many  talks 
and  many  dealings.  His  history  as  I  know  it,  and  my 
history  as  he  knows  it,  are  what  enable  us  to  interpret  and 
develop  the  existence  of  each  for  the  other.  We  are  two 
things,  no  doubt ;  made  up  of  so  many  pounds  of  carbon 
and  other  chemical  substances.  But  that  is  only  one 
aspect,  and  is  not  the  important  aspect  for  either  of  us.  We 
are  equally  clearly  two  living  organisms  which  imply  for 
their  reality  self-control  and  self-development,  in  accord- 
ance with  inherent  biological  ends  which  go  beyond  the 
level  of  the  mechanical  and  chemical  relations  that  are 
the  characteristics  of  the  mere  thing.  But  still,  if  we 
were  merely  living  organisms,  we  should  have  no  con- 
sciousness, no  knowledge,  no  feeling.  We  should  not 
each  be  "I,"  or  for  each  other  what  we  are.  We  should 
not  be  selves  or  personalities.  Now  it  is  just  in  so  far  as 
we  are  selves  or  personalities,  with  what  this  implies  in 
the  way  of  recollection,  of  experience,  and  of  recognition 
of  the  self  as  grouped  with  other  selves  in  society,  that  we 
as  friends  have  meaning  for  each  other.  Apart  from  know- 
ledge of  this  kind  we  should  not  exist  for  each  other  as 
we  are.  The  essence  of  our  mutual  existence  is  the 
meaning  we  have  for  each  other.  That  meaning  is  con- 
stitutive of  such  existence.  Of  other  men  I  say  that  they 
might  conceivably  have  had  such  special  relations  to  me, 
but  they  have  not,  and  by  so  much  I  do  not  know  them. 


MY  FRIEND  AND   I  163 

Their  individual  personalities  may  have  special  signifi- 
cation for  others,  but  for  me  they  have  no  special  significa- 
tion. They  are  only  members  of  the  species  man,  a  great 
fact  carrying  in  its  train  great  social  implications.  In 
possessing  this  meaning  for  me  they  do  exist  as  men.  But 
for  me  they  do  not  exist  as  my  friends,  for  they  have  no 
relation  to  me  of  this  kind,  and  the  friendship  has  there- 
fore no  place  in  my  own  particular  world  of  fact.  The 
condition  of  friendship  is  the  recognition  it  implies. 

When,  therefore,  I  recognise  my  friend,  I  have  passed 
far  beyond  the  limits  of  mere  sensation,  of  mere  sight,  or 
of  mere  touch,  considered  as  nothing  more.  These  stand 
for  necessary  moments  in  direct  knowledge.  But  what  I 
get  from  them  are  the  indications  which  I  interpret  and 
on  which  I  build  my  conceptions,  conceptions  which  are 
inseparable  from  the  reality  of  my  world,  but  which  are 
yet  largely  drawn  from  my  own  self-knowledge.  For  it 
is  only  by  interpreting  my  friend  in  the  light  of  the 
content  of  my  own  consciousness,  with  its  recollections  and 
other  material  stored  up  in  it,  as  acquired  in  the  past  and 
preserved  in  my  memory,  that  I  find  the  reality  of  the 
orders  with  which  I  am  concerned  in  my  knowledge  of 
him.  He  is  what  he  is,  in  the  first  place,  because  he  is  a 
body  with  a  particular  appearance  and  history.  That 
enables  him  to  be  segregated  and  identified  as  the  living 
body  of  John  Smith.  But  although  this  is  a  phase  and  a 
necessary  one  in  his  existence  as  a  particular  man,  and  as 
different  from  myself,  it  is  not  all  or  nearly  all.  It  is  the 
characteristics  that  appear  to  pertain  to  John  Smith  at 
a  higher  order  of  knowledge  than  this  one,  that  have  made 
it  possible  that  he  and  I  should  have  the  significance  for 
each  other  in  which  we  have  become  friends. 

What  is  the  foundation  of  such  significance  ?  Plainly 
this,  that  we  feel  and  think  and  remember  alike.  Alike, 
but  not  in  exactly  the  same  way.  He  has  his  point  of 
view,  and  I  my  own.  But  although  differences  come  in, 
these  points  of  view  do  not  conflict.  For  there  is  corre- 
spondence between  them.  In  that  there  is  difference  they 
are  not  identical.  If  they  were,  there  would  not  be  two 
distinct  minds,  each  conscious  of  the  other  as  its  object. 
For  all  consciousness  of  objects  implies  consciousness  of 
difference.  But  in  consciousness  there  may  be  correspon- 
dence, that  is,  the  recognition  of  identity  in  difference. 


164  THE  SELF  IN  KNOWLEDGE 

Now  it'  is  only  when  the  level  of  thought  is  reached  that 
we  can  have  identity  in  difference.  Thoughts  can  be 
identical  because  they  are  in  the  nature,  not  of  events, 
but  of  what  is  of  the  universal  in  character.  But  mere 
feelings  and  other  events,  if  indeed  there  be  such,  must 
have  the  particular  as  characteristic  of  their  nature,  and 
are,  just  on  that  account,  never  identical.  If  we  would  get 
precise  information  about  them,  we  must  use  methods  such 
as  Professor  Whitehead's  method  of  Extensive  Abstraction. 
We  may  so  reduce  them  to  their  limiting  conceptions.  As 
such  they  will  become  instants  and  points  in  time  and 
space  ;  that  is,  they  will  become  abstractions  of  reflection. 
When  Leibnitz  spoke  of  the  identity  of  indiscernibles,  he 
used  a  rather  doubtful  expression.  No  doubt  conceptions 
of  thought,  if  they  are  held  out  at  arm's  length  and 
distorted  into  mere  occurrences  in  time  and  space  by 
the  artificial  procedure  of  psychology,  may  in  a  sense  be 
spoken  of  as  indiscernible,  provided  they  are  not  sought 
to  be  distinguished  merely  as  successive  events.  But  even 
that  is  not  quite  true,  because  they  remain,  like  instants 
and  points,  discerned  as  separate  in  space-time.  In  so 
far  they  belong  to  thought  and  are  not  truly  held  out 
without  reference  to  self  as  mere  occurrences,  but  are  in 
truth  thoughts  reached  by  reasoning  about  experience. 
We  cannot  form  any  pictorial  ideas  that  are  true  of  instants 
or  points.  We  always  present  them  as  concrete  indi- 
viduals in  imagination.  When,  on  the  other  hand,  we 
say  that  their  meaning  is  the  same,  what  we  actually  intend 
to  convey  is,  that  the  thinking  imported  is  identical  in 
character,  and  not  that  there  is  external  resemblance 
between  two  mental  pictures,  as  in  the  fashion  in  which 
one  fact  external  to  another  in  time  and  space  may 
resemble  it.  But  even  in  the  latter  case  corresponding 
reflection  is  ultimately  at  the  root  of  reality. 

When  John  Smith  and  I  meet  at  my  door  and  shake 
hands,  and  begin  to  talk  of  what  interests  us  in  the 
progress  of  the  harvest  or  of  the  Church  Missionary 
Society,  it  is  the  correspondence  in  our  thinking  that 
matters.  It  is  actual  identity  in  conception  that  underlies 
that  correspondence  in  our  reflections.  Differences,  of 
course,  there  are,  but  not  such  as  to  preclude  correspon- 
dence in  our  ways  of  looking  at  things  based  on  sameness 
of  conception.  For  thought  as  such  is  no  activity  in  space 


THE   NATURE   OF   RECOGNITION  165 

or  time.  It  is  that  in  which  such  activity  and  all  else  is 
presented. 

What  is  the  relationship  that  is  essential  when  two 
friends  meet  ?  The  respective  individualities  do  not  lie 
in  the  filling  of  different  parts  of  space  with  substances,  or 
even  in  the  fulfilment  of  similar  ends  by  the  living 
organisms,  but  in  a  wide  range  of  meaning  and  its  inter- 
pretation common  to  the  two  minds.  Each  is  mind  for 
the  other,  and  is  a  particular  mind  with  a  characteristic 
embodiment,  inasmuch  as  in  each  mind  expresses  itself 
in  the  form  of  a  living  organism  that  knows  as  well  as 
lives,  a  form  that  is  indeed  inadequate  to  the  full  reality, 
but  yet  so  far  is  symbolical  of  intelligence. 

As  we  shall  see  later  on  when  we  come  to  consider 
the  principle  of  degrees  or  orders  in  knowledge  and  reality, 
mechanism  and  life  belong  to  different  orders,  neither  of 
which  is  explicable  or  can  even  be  expressed  in  the  terms 
that  belong  to  the  other.  A  machine  is  a  structure  in 
which  the  parts,  be  they  regarded  merely  as  aggregates  of 
molecules  or  be  they  looked  on  as  larger  masses  of  matter, 
are  held  together  and  aggregated  ab  extra  through  a  system 
of  causation  in  which  the  cause  lies  outside  the  effect.  In 
a  living  organism,  on  the  other  hand,  the  meaning  and  the 
possibility  of  existence  lie,  not  in  any  outside  cause,  but 
in  an  end  which  is  everywhere  and  at  all  moments  recog- 
nised as  being  actively  present,  and  as  in  its  domination 
constantly  preserving  itself  amid  metabolism  of  material. 
The  whole  is  in  each  part,  and  the  parts  do  not  exist 
except  in  behaving  as  realising  the  whole.  The 
organism  reproduces  itself,  and  the  new  life  inherits,  in  a 
fashion  that  is  inexplicable  mechanically,  modes  of  be- 
haviour in  which  it  resembles  countless  other  individuals 
of  the  same  species.  It  is  thus  that,  self-fashioned,  it 
pursues  a  definite  course  from  birth  to  death.  This  is 
so  throughout  nature,  and  to  try  to  explain  it  mechanically, 
as  the  fortuitous  result  of  external  causes,  comes  to  seem, 
as  the  range  of  observation  is  progressively  extending, 
more  and  more  of  an  absurdity.  Life  can  only  be  stated 
in  terms  of  life.  The  repugnance  to  so  stating  its  nature 
has  arisen  from  the  narrow  notion  that  to  do  so  is  to 
express  the  quasi-purposive  character  of  an  end  as  being 
something  supernatural,  in  the  sense  of  lying  outside  the 
laws  of  nature.  But  this  anxiety  is  exaggerated.  It 


166  THE  SELF  IN  KNOWLEDGE 

arises  from  the  assumption  that  the  world  of  nature  can 
be  stated  in  terms  of  matter  and  motion.  The  defects  of 
this  view  we  considered  earlier.  It  is  not  harder  to  believe 
that  life  is  more  than  mechanism  than  it  is  to  believe  that 
knowledge  is  more  than  life.  It  is  true  that  knowledge, 
referred  to  the  course  of  nature  taken  as  a  "  closed  system," 
is  found  in  the  individual  human  being  as  conditioned  by 
his  organism,  just  as  his  life  is  found  to  be  dependent  on 
mechanical  conditions.  To  accept  this  fact  is  one  thing. 
It  is  quite  a  different  thing  to  identify  the  two,  or  to  try 
to  reduce  the  higher  to  the  lower,  or  to  express  it  in  terms 
of  the  lower.  They  are  not  separate  entities  in  time  and 
space,  but  belong  to  different  orders  of  experience,  ex- 
hibiting that  relativity  which  belongs  to  all  our  knowledge, 
and  are  subject  to  the  laws  of  their  own  order  and  not 
of  other  orders  which  have  no  meaning  for  them.  Nature 
treated  as  a  "  closed  system  "  is  not  fully  interpreted. 
Unless  this  is  realised  difficulties  of  explanation  become 
insuperable.  The  principles  of  the  conservation  and 
degradation  of  energy  belong  to  the  mechanical  aspect 
or  order  of  principle,  and,  as  applying  to  that  aspect,  we 
have  no  reason  to  question  their  unbroken  sway.  When 
we  come  to  the  other  order,  in  reality  and  in  our  know- 
ledge of  it,  within  which  life  falls,  the  notion  of  what  we 
call  in  this  connection  an  end  as  the  controlling  influence 
is  just  as  natural.  There  is  never  anything  that  is  super- 
natural in  the  sense  of  violating  the  conditions  obtaining 
throughout  its  own  order.  But  there  are  many  different 
orders,  and  it  is  the  confusion  of  their  points  of  view  and 
appropriate  conceptions  with  those  of  other  orders  that 
gives  rise  to  the  false  idea  of  the  supernatural. 

When  I  and  my  friend  recognise  each  other  and  begin 
to  talk,  it  is  to  a  still  higher  order  in  the  varying  aspects  of 
reality  than  the  order  of  mere  life  that  the  relationship  of 
correspondence  in  our  minds  belongs.  This  is  now  the 
dominant  order,  and  is  other  than  that  in  which  causation, 
or  even  the  fulfilment  by  the  living  organism  of  the  ends 
which  fashion  its  course  of  life,  prevail.  It  is  in  terms  of 
this  order  that  we  say  that  the  most  important  relationship 
of  human  beings  to  each  other  is  one  which  turns  on  true 
identity  of  thought.  Human  individuality  implies  many 
aspects,  mental,  organic  and  inorganic.  The  body  ex- 
presses personality,  and  is  symbolical  of  personality  as 


PERSONALITY  167 

its  interpretation,  but  it  is,  in  aspects  which  are  inseparable 
from  its  reality,  not  the  less  a  physical  body.  These  are 
the  aspects  in  which  individuals  are  external  to  one  another. 
When  we  reach  the  level  in  reality  which  belongs  to  the 
higher  order  called  mind,  there  is  difference  here  also 
between  individualities,  yet  it  is  difference  which  does  not 
have  its  root  in  externality,  but  in  that  divergence  which 
is  embraced  in  all  correspondence,  and  yet  ultimately  im- 
plies the  identity  in  difference  between  modes  of  thinking 
that  lies  at  the  foundation  of  correspondence  in  mental 
activity.  It  is  an  identity  the  import  of  which  extends 
to  memory,  to  imagination,  and  to  feeling,  as  well  as  to 
reflective  activity. 

How  the  world  we  experience  seems  to  us,  and  what  it 
really  is  for  us,  thus  depends  in  the  event  on  interpretation, 
and  the  meaning  which  is  the  result  of  that  interpretation. 
Knowledge  is  a  process,  an  activity.  It  is  what  we  have 
called  dynamic  and  never  static,  in  the  nature  of  subject 
rather  than  substance.  What  it  yields  it  yields  in  a  form 
that  is  always  in  large  measure  of  a  general  character. 
The  merely  particular  has  no  meaning  for  us  excepting  as 
set  in  the  universal.  In  saying  this  I  am  not  referring  to 
mere  psychological  analysis,  which  is  often  bound  to  be 
artificial,  nor  am  I  thinking  of  knowledge  as  an  instrument. 
To  have  regarded  it  as  such  seems  to  me  to  have  been  one 
of  the  most  grievous  errors  in  the  past,  and  to  be  a  common 
one  even  to-day.  The  error  is  due  to  the  idea  that  know- 
ledge can  be  treated  as  just  a  means  by  the  use  of  which 
we  gain  access  to  its  object,  and  it  has  suggested  the  false 
idea  that  there  is  an  insuperable  gulf  which  must  separate 
what  is  called  mind  from  matter,  and  make  us  choose 
between  idealism  and  realism. 

The  simplest  way  of  approaching  the  problem  of  what 
reality  amounts  to  is  to  start  with  experience  as  real,  and 
to  watch  its  implications  and  changes.  As  I  sit  in  my 
chair  I  have  a  definite  experience,  varying  constantly  in 
its  scope,  of  what  surrounds  me  in  the  room  where  I  am, 
and  of  what  I  see  out  of  the  window.  Other  and  different 
experiences  are  open  to  me  if  I  choose  to  move  about,  and 
so  alter  the  conditions,  or  to  make  extensive  use  of  such 
further  senses  as  that  of  touch.  But  each  form  in  my 
experience  seems  to  consist  with  every  other,  and  to  fit 
into  a  system  or  entirety  which  can  be  accounted  for  as  real 


168  THE   SELF   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

only  if  the  explanation  be  sought  for,  not  from  lower  up 
towards  higher,  but  from  the  self  downwards.  What  I 
see  is  different  from  what  I  feel,  but  there  is  correspondence 
between  them,  and  they  appear  to  belong  to  a  single  system. 
Now  this  system  as  a  whole  has  certainly  one  condition.  It 
is  and  must  be  no  less  than  the  entirety  of  the  experience 
of  the  self  that  in  one  of  its  aspects  at  all  events  is  sitting 
in  the  chair.  That  self  is  limited  by  the  external  organism, 
with  its  various  modes  and  channels  of  sensation,  in  which 
it  finds  expression  in  the  nature  which  is  its  object- world. 
Indeed,  there  appears  to  be  no  self  independent  of  the 
organism.  But,  then,  what  is  this  organism  ?  It  is  more 
than  merely  living.  It  has  eyes,  and  thus  it  sees  ;  it  has 
ears,  and  thus  it  hears  ;  it  has  hands,  and  thus  it  touches. 
It  has,  too,  a  brain,  and  it  thus  apprehends  and  under- 
stands. At  first  glance  these  qualities  look  like  the 
properties  of  a  thing.  But  is  this  anything  approaching 
to  a  sufficient  account  of  them,  even  when  regarded  as 
qualities  of  what  sits  in  the  chair  ?  Let  us  see. 

When  I,  sitting  here,  put  to  myself  the  question  of  what 
I  am,  there  is  one  answer  which,  so  far  as  it  carries  me, 
is  obviously  true.  I  am  subject  in  knowledge  as  plainly 
as  I  am  object.  That  is  just  to  say  that  I  know.  I  am 
the  centre,  finite,  it  is  true,  but  still  the  centre,  in  which 
my  experience  holds  together  and  to  which  it  is  referred 
back.  I  individually  have  direct  experience  through  my 
senses  of  very  little  of  the  universe.  Beyond  Carlton 
House  Terrace,  the  mansions  of  which  I  can  see  from  where 
I  sit,  there  lies  a  great  city.  I  infer  this  from  data  with 
which  my  sense  organs  furnish  me,  though  I  do  not  have 
direct  sense-experience  of  the  London  that  lies  beyond  the 
horizon  of  vision.  I  think  of  my  actual  experience  as 
forming  part  of  an  intelligible  system,  the  parts  and  rela- 
tions of  which  that  are  not  directly  experienced  can  be 
known  indirectly  from  what  is  immediately  known.  The 
full  system  is  constructed  in  my  experience  through  con- 
cepts applied,  and  it  is  in  the  light  of  the  conceptual  whole 
that  I  attach  meaning  to  the  part  in  front  of  me.  This 
whole  exists  for  me  who  am  stationed  here  and  now.  It 
may  have  an  existence  and  meaning  beyond  this  fact,  but 
it  has  at  least  this  form  of  existence  and  meaning. 

When  I  turn  reflection  in  upon  the  "  me  "  for  whom 
these  things  are,  the  first  thing  that  strikes  me  is  that  it  is 


THE  SELF  AS  EXPERIENCED  169 

obvious  why  I  apprehend  directly  only  a  fragment  of  the 
Universe.  The  "  I  "  who  apprehends  it  can  indeed  think 
unrestrained  by  physical  limits,  and  can  pass  in  thought 
by  inference  and  reasoning  beyond  the  margin  of  what  it 
can  perceive.  For  mind,  if  it  may  be  spoken  of  as  an 
instrument,  has  no  boundary  to  its  scope.  It  can  have 
none,  for  its  problems  are  in  truth  its  own  creatures.  If 
the  self  fails  in  wielding  reason  it  is  not  because  of  any 
defect  in  its  instrument,  but  because  of  its  inability  to  wield 
it.  For  the  self  is  in  its  aspect  as  object  for  itself  physically 
limited.  I  am  not  my  clothes,  nor  are  the  surroundings 
which  belong  to  my  bodily  life  part  of  my  nature  as  subject 
in  knowledge.  And  yet  they  condition  its  grasp  and  power 
of  presentation.  They  set  bounds  to  my  bodily  activity, 
and  the  bondage  of  the  body  affects  the  power  of  the  mind. 
When  overcome  by  fatigue  or  drowsiness  I  cannot  think 
properly.  The  existence  of  my  soul  is  so  far  at  least 
dependent  on  conditions  of  time  and  space  and  the  material 
that  fills  them. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  for  me  sitting  here  that  the 
panorama  of  life  presents  itself.  It  may  be  that  a  meaning 
can  be  ascribed  to  its  possible  existence  independently  of 
me,  but  excepting  as  known  as  it  is  for  me,  actually  or 
possibly,  it  does  not  come  before  me,  and  cannot  come  to 
utterance.  In  that  sense  at  least  its  existence  centres  in 
me.  What  were  a  world  apart  from  relations  such  as 
externality,  and  cause,  and  end,  and  beauty,  and  goodness  ? 
And  what  do  these  signify  apart  from  their  interpretation 
by  the  mind  that  apprehends  them  ?  To  project  them  all 
into  a  so-called  "  non-mental  "  world  is  just  to  project 
mind  with  them  into  that  world,  and  thus,  not  to  eliminate 
a  subjective  side  in  knowledge,  but  to  demonstrate  afresh 
its  inseparability  as  an  integral  moment  in  the  entirety. 
Subjective  idealism  and  objective  realism  seem  to  be 
little  else  than  different  names  for  the  same  inadequate 
attempt. 

When,  then,  I  ask  what  the  "  I  "  is,  it  is  not  surprising 
that  it  is  difficult  of  description  excepting  as  an  essential 
moment  in  the  "  not-me."  By  withdrawing  my  attention 
from  the  latter  I  become  more  and  more  clearly  aware  of 
the  presence  at  every  turn  in  my  experience  of  conceptual 
thought,  the  thought  which  directs  itself  to  concentration, 
not  simply  on  particulars  of  sense,  but  on  their  relations 


170  THE  SELF   IN   KNOWLEDGE 


and  the  meanings  which  these  relations  embody.  The 
"  I  "  is  the  centre  of  thought  to  which  these  are  all  referred. 
It  is  to  "  me  "  that  the  whole  of  experience  is  brought  back. 
When  it  is  brought  back  in  the  form  of  reflection,  rather 
than  of  sensuous  apprehension,  it  is  brought  to  a  focus  in 
thinking,  to  mind  itself  as  sought  to  be  disentangled  from 
what  is  for  mind.  It  is  only  by  abstraction  that  the  dis- 
tinction is  affected,  but  the  abstraction  is  one  which  lays 
stress  on  the  mental  side  as  not  less  actual  than  what  is 
taken  to  be  the  physical  side.  "I,"  approached  thus,  am 
of  the  nature  of  the  universal.  Except  as  it  is  for  me  the 
world  is  incapable  of  interpretation.  Object  and  subject 
therefore  cannot  be  looked  on  as  two  things  existing  inde- 
pendently or  as  separate  entities  of  any  kind.  They  are 
rather  different  aspects  in  an  integral  process  or  spiritual 
activity,  a  whole  within  which  both  fall  as  aspects.  That 
whole  is  experience,  an  experience  that  is  dynamic  and  not 
static,  and  is  in  its  real  nature  subject  yet  more  distinctly 
than  substance. 

But  the  aspects  of  this  experience  do  not  themselves 
appear  as  having  significance  independently  of  each  other. 
It  is  true  that  I,  who  sit  in  this  chair  and  look  out  of  the 
window,  am  from  one  point  of  view  just  activity  in  reflec- 
tion, the  centre  to  which  the  activities  of  thought  and 
volition  and  freedom  are  referred.  But  although  this 
centre  I  am  finite.  And  the  finiteness  appears  on  scrutiny 
to  consist  in  the  fact  that  the  self  is  expressed  in  an  organism 
which  it  invests  with  intelligence  and  with  the  distinctive 
characteristics  of  mind.  The  self  is  related  to  its  organism, 
not  as  a  thing  apart,  but  rather  as  an  end  which  it  embodies. 
It  is  thus  that  the  organism,  taken  at  a  higher  degree  in 
its  reality,  is  a  rational  being,  and  possesses  initiative  and 
freedom  in  this  initiative.  We  mean  to  convey  so  much 
when  we  say  that  the  organism  is  a  personality.  It  is 
more  than  mere  life,  it  is  still  more  than  a  mere  machine. 
And  yet  it  presents  the  aspects  which  are  distinctive  of  each 
of  these  orders  of  existence,  though  it  presents  them  only 
in  a  relationship  to  the  higher  orders  just  referred  to.  They 
are  essential,  for  apart  from  them  the  nature  of  the  self 
would  consist  merely  in  the  universals  of  reflection,  and 
there  would  be  no  world  of  nature.  Differences  between 
personalities  would  not  exist.  It  is  through  the  organic 
and  the  inorganic  conditions  under  which  it  is  known  as 


CONCLUSIONS   OF  THE   CHAPTER  171 

its  own  object  that  the  self  is  a  finite  centre  and  a  distinct 
individual. 

We  may  put  the  conclusions  of  this  chapter  in  another 
way  in  which  the  transition  towards  completion  by  experi- 
ence is  apparent.  As  we  find  it  experience  implies  a  self 
whose  experience  it  is.  But,  even  if  we  make  abstraction 
in  reflection  from  the  self,  and  regard  the  object- world  of 
nature  as  though  it  could  be  closed  to  mind,  we  see  in  that 
object- world  the  suggestion  of  the  relation  between  per- 
cipient and  perceived  which  thrusts  itself  more  and 
more  clearly  on  our  attention  as  we  progress.  Even  the 
merest  living  organism  appears  to  be  continuously  distin- 
guishing itself  from  its  environment  in  a  fashion  that  has 
no  analogue  in  the  machine.  The  oyster  closes  its  shell 
when  a  foreign  substance  is  sought  to  be  introduced.  It 
gives  out  and  takes  in  what  the  end  that  controls  its 
processes  of  life  requires.  It  may  have  no  consciousness, 
no  feeling,  but  its  life  presents  this  characteristic.  As  we 
go  higher  there  is  a  closer  approximation  to  the  reality  of 
a  self.  The  dog  may  not  say  "I,"  but  he  has  a  sense  of 
property.  He  resents  the  intrusion  into  his  house  of 
another  dog,  which  he  will  yet  tolerate  outside  it ;  he  barks 
at  a  stranger  who  approaches  the  door  ;  he  has  a  sense  of 
propriety  which  makes  him  ashamed  when  he  has  mis- 
behaved. All  this  shows  that  he  has  formed  in  his  intelli- 
gence the  germ  of  a  consciousness  of  self.  The  w  orld  is  not 
significant  for  him  as  it  is  for  us.  He  is  lacking  in  concepts. 
For  him  the  full  world  does  not  exist,  but  some  world  does 
from  which  he  distinguishes  himself  as  if  from  a  not-self. 

When  we  reach  the  contemplation  of  man  in  experience 
a  still  higher  level  has  been  attained.  The  significances 
of  both  the  not-self  and  the  self  are  fuller.  As  organisms 
we  are  in  the  world.  But  we  are  more  than  of  it,  because 
that  world  is  included  along  with  ourselves  in  an  entirety 
of  reflection.  To  that  entirety  we  belong  as  mind,  not  hi 
the  way  in  which  a  thing  with  a  number  is  found  among 
other  things  with  different  numbers,  but  as  forms  of  mind 
at  a  stage  in  knowledge  at  which  the  whole  is  realised  as 
single  and  indivisible,  save  in  so  far  as  at  this  stage  know- 
ledge expresses  itself  as  conditioned  by  external  require- 
ments for  its  self-expression.  These  conditions  belong  to 
the  that  from  which  we  start  and  cannot  go  behind.  But 
the  brain  and  the  personality,  external  as  they  are  in  one 


172  THE   SELF   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

aspect,  are  not  the  less  expressive  of  mind  and  recognised 
as  signifying  the  presence  of  mind.  That  the  objective 
world  should  be  reached  at  all,  through  the  nerves  and  the 
cerebral  centres,  is  evidence  of  what  the  organism  signifies 
for  a  more  adequate  interpretation. 

Mind  thus  finds  mind  in  external  form.  But  the  exter- 
nality when  construed  receives  meaning  only  through 
distinctions  which  fall  within  knowledge.  As,  therefore, 
we  proceed  to  a  still  more  adequate  view  of  knowledge, 
more  adequate  because  now  wide  enough  to  account  for  the 
hard  facts,  we  find  that  the  general  distinction  between 
object  and  subject  which  seems  so  fundamental  when 
superficially  looked  at,  is  itself  one  which  has  a  subordinate 
place  when  regarded  from  the  only  standpoints  that  are 
adequate,  those  of  knowledge  as  an  entirety. 

We  saw  how  this  view  pressed  itself  on  us  even  in 
physical  science.  For,  as  Chapter  IV  made  apparent,  even 
the  resolute  attempt  to  treat  nature  as  closed  to  mind  made 
by  Professor  Whitehead  only  demonstrated  afresh  the 
derivation  of  the  reality  of  its  object  from  the  mind  that  the 
object  appears  to  confront  as  independent  of  it.  This  is 
the  lesson  taught  alike  by  science  in  all  its  forms  and  by 
philosophy. 


CHAPTER    VIII 

MEANING   AS   ENTERING   INTO    REALITY 

IF  the  path  pursued  is  leading  in  a  right  direction,  we  have 
got  some  distance  towards  a  source  of  light  by  which  we 
may  read  the  self.  My  experience  has  its  focus  in  an 
"I,"  which  is  the  essential  condition  of  all  experience. 
As  we  saw  in  an  early  chapter,  presence  to  mind  has  been 
made,  by  at  least  one  eminent  mathematician  under  the 
form  of  sense- awareness,  the  foundation  of  the  con- 
gruence of  the  various  space-time  systems  of  nature, 
objective  but  varying,  according  to  the  principle  of  physical 
relativity.  Nature  thus  in  truth  does  not  shut  out  mind. 
The  relation  of  mind  to  nature  is  a  foundational  one,  and 
it  lies  in  this,  that  there  can  be  no  meaning  in  any  object- 
world  that  is  not  object- world  for  a  knower.  If  there  can 
be  no  meaning  for  the  object  there  can  be  accordingly  no 
existence  for  it.  For  existence  involves  meaning,  and  is 
not  a  fact  unless  it  is  significant. 

The  difficulty  which  people  feel  in  accepting  such  a  view 
as  this  arises,  as  we  saw,  from  their  identification  of  the 
self  that  knows  with  the  self  as  merely  known.  The  latter 
is  taken  to  be  merely  a  particular  object  in  space  and  time, 
especially  in  so  far  as  it  has  the  form  of  a  living  organism. 
To  this  extent  it  is  obviously  dependent  on  nature,  and 
nature  does  not  depend  on  it. 

Of  course  this  is  so  far  truth.  But  it  is  not  the  full 
truth.  For  the  fact  that  nature  is  not  exclusive  of  the 
work  of  mind  in  constituting  it  is  shown,  even  in  our  mere 
sense-awareness,  to  be  a  necessary  condition  of  the  possi- 
bility of  congruence.  This  seems  to  imply  that  the  object- 
world  has  as  its  correlative  the  subject  for  which  it  is  the 
field  of  knowledge  that  is  present  to  that  subject,  and  in 
which  it  distinguishes  even  itself  as  made  object  from 
itself.  The  relation  is  an  impossible  one  to  visualise,  simply 

13  173 


174          MEANING  AS  ENTERING  INTO  REALITY 

because  visualisation  can  only  be  of  what  are  possible 
objects  in  the  field  of  perception.  Now  knowledge  merely 
as  such  is  no  object  external  to  the  mind  that  knows.  Its 
nature  is  to  be  just  itself,  subject  and  not  substance, 
definable  in  no  terms  beyond  its  own.  Its  character  must 
therefore  partake  of  that  of  the  universal.  When  I  say 
that  I  know  I  do  not  grasp  at  any  particular.  I  refer  to 
thought,  general  in  its  character  and  application.  To  get  at 
what  is  particular  I  must  include  my  object- world,  and  in- 
clude it  as  an  aspect  in  my  individuality.  Thus  knowledge 
is,  taken  in  isolation,  an  abstraction  and  as  such  unreal. 
It  is  one  moment  only  in  the  real.  Subject  and  object 
are,  in  short,  undivorceable.  For  they  are  aspects  mutually 
implied  in  the  only  kind  of  reality  that  is  in  character 
ultimate,  inasmuch  as  there  can  be  no  meaning  in  any- 
thing outside  it.  This  is  individual,  and  of  the  nature  of 
the  concrete  universal  which  involves  presence  to  a  subject, 
but  includes  an  object  aspect  just  as  much  as  that  of  being 
subject. 

If  all  this  be  true,  then  when  we  find  mind  as  an  object 
in  nature,  which  we  do  when  the  object  is  an  intelligent 
living  being,  mind  is  recognising  itself,  and  is  confronted 
in  its  object,  not  with  any  separate  entity,  but  with  itself, 
with  what  signifies  intelligence  and  that  identity  which 
is  distinctive  of  the  universals  of  thought  alone,  the 
identity  in  difference  in  which  I  found  my  relation  to  my 
friend,  John  Smith,  to  lie.  My  organism  as  expressive 
of  knowledge  is  essentially  here  and  now.  His,  as  similarly 
expressive,  is  there  and  then.  And  in  my  organism  I  am 
aware  of  myself  as  a  centre,  finite  in  virtue  of  my  corporeal 
conditions,  but  still  a  centre,  of  experience  as  it  is  for  me. 
In  virtue  of  the  fact  that  in  my  fellow-man  I  am  finding 
a  self  that  corresponds  to  my  own,  I  recognise  that  John 
Smith  is  mind,  and  that,  in  knowing  him  as  object  for  my 
knowledge,  mind  is  finding  mind.  It  is  the  universals 
of  thought  that  make  our  relations  correspond.  They 
exhibit  identity  amid  difference,  depending  for  its  form 
on  standpoint.  If  he  is  there  and  then  for  me,  when  I  am 
here  and  now,  I  am  then  and  there  reciprocally  for  him  as 
here  and  now.  Literal  identity  in  conception  can  alone 
make  this  intelligible. 

It  is  thus  the  intrinsic  relation  of  the  two,  not  as  separate 
entities,  but  as  aspects  differentiated  within  the  entirety 


FINITE    MIND  175 

of  knowledge  by  itself,  to  which  we  must  look  if  we  are 
to  get  a  better  understanding  of  the  relation  of  subject 
to  object  and  of  our  minds  to  those  of  others  and  to  nature. 
Metaphor  is  specially  unhelpful  in  the  solution  of  the 
problem.  We  cannot  succeed  if  we  start  off  with  an 
image  such  as  that  of  two  things  confronting  each  other. 
For  just  the  same  reason,  what  is  higher  will  prove  inex- 
plicable if  the  platform  chosen  for  departure  is  one  which 
belongs  to  a  lower  order  in  reflection.  Mind  cannot  be 
reached  from  matter.  Nor  can  their  relations  be  under- 
stood if  mind  is  visualised,  as  Locke  and  Berkeley  and 
Hume  tried  to  visualise  it.  Knowledge  must  be  allowed 
to  explain  itself.  That  is  why  its  embodiment  in  meaning 
becomes  of  crucial  importance,  and  why  reality  in  the 
end  turns  out  to  be  a  form  of  meaning.  To  try  to  witness 
the  genesis  of  mind  in  time  is  thus,  so  far  as  concerns  the 
ultimate  nature  and  significance  of  mind,  to  try  to  put 
the  cart  before  the  horse.  Such  a  procedure  may  be  useful 
for  the  psychologist  as  an  artifice,  but  it  can  throw  no  light 
on  the  final  character  of  the  real.  It  is  common  ground 
that  the  physical  form  of  man  presents  different  aspects. 
Its  inherent  character  varies  as  the  standpoint  from  which 
it  is  regarded  in  reflection  varies.  At  one  level  in  experi- 
ence it  is  reality  as  physical.  At  another  it  is  recognised 
as  the  expression  of  an  "I,"  which  is  not  the  less  an  "  I  " 
because  it  is  known,  in  a  form  arising  within  the  field  of 
its  own  reflection,  as  sitting  in  a  chair.  As  we  withdraw 
from  the  chair  we  approach  progressively  towards  the 
"  I  "  that  is  plainly  much  more  than  a  thing,  and  we  find 
that  the  progress  is  towards  its  identification  with  the 
cardinal  fact  that  we  know. 

It  may  be  useful  to  pursue  this  line  further,  and  to  ask 
what  is  implied  when  we  speak  of  mind  with  a  form  that 
is  finite. 

I  walk  along  the  street  in  a  world  of  persons  and  things. 
I  am  one  of  these,  but  I  am  also  a  particular  mind  which 
is  in  a  sense  their  centre  and  which  recognises  them  as 
there.  What  does  this  mean  ?  To  take  an  analogy 
from  mathematical  physics,  I  am  at  rest  and  in  relation 
to  me  the  world  is  changing.  But  this  is  only  relatively 
true,  for  I  am  in  my  turn  a  changing  object  for  others, 
who,  like  myself,  take  themselves  to  be  finite  centres  at 
rest  with  existence  changing  while  there  for  them.  To 


176        MEANING  AS  ENTERING   INTO  REALITY 

be  at  rest  in  this  sense  is  therefore  for  general  interpreta- 
tion as  much  a  relative  conception  as  it  is  in  physics.  The 
difference  is  that  whereas  in  physics  the  position  depends 
on  the  system  of  co-ordinates  chosen,  here  it  depends  on 
the  system  of  concepts  employed,  those  of  mind  and  of 
its  self-disclosure  as  object.  Such  relativity  is  possible 
in  both  cases  only  because  our  knowledge  is  through 
universals.  Because  it  is  mind  that  expresses  itself  and 
characterises  us,  John  Smith  and  I  are  what  we  are  to 
each  other  through  the  identity  of  our  thought  about 
things.  We  are  finite  centres  which  present  such 
identity  amid  differences.  That  is  why  we  find  ourselves 
in  the  same  world  and  see  the  same  people  and  the  same 
streets. 

To  understand  this  we  have  to  avoid  forgetting,  what 
has  already  been  said,  that  to  have  meaning  is  of  the 
essence  of  being  actual.  Our  interpretation  of  our  own 
experience  may  be  right  or  it  may  be  wrong,  but  in 
the  absence  of  some  interpretation  experience  is  neither 
real  nor  experience  at  all.  It  is  impossible  to  interpret 
existence  otherwise  than  as  a  form  of  meaning.  That  is 
what  Kant  taught  us  a  long  time  ago,  and  Kant  was  not 
the  first  to  point  it  out.  The  object  thus  stands  in  an 
integral  relation  with  knowledge,  and  has  its  origin  in 
distinctions  made  within  it.  Such  knowledge  may  be 
of  varying  degrees  and  kinds,  the  outcome  of  the  self- 
directing  freedom  of  mind  that  pursues  it.  With  these 
variations  there  will  alter  the  characters  apprehended  in 
the  object.  This  is  no  fleeting  or  independent  set  of 
sense-particulars.  For  it  is  only  by  employing  general 
conceptions  that  we  can  even  speak  about  it.  That  this 
is  so  is  obvious.  A  square  is  no  affair  of  passive  awareness. 
It  is  a  symbol  of  what  is  interpreted  as  of  a  significance 
that  is  general.  Nor  is  a  living  organism  a  revelation 
through  bare  sensation.  Its  distinctive  character  is  that 
we  recognise  in  it  self-conservation,  an  end  conceived 
as  dominant  and  remaining  so  through  change  in  par- 
ticulars and  continuous  metabolism  of  material.  Here, 
again,  we  are  confronted  with  what  is  in  character  universal. 

I  will  endeavour  to  bring  together  the  results  so  far 
reached.  They  embody  what  is  suggested  as  the  basis 
for  completion  of  the  necessary  view  of  nature. 

1.  The  only  method  of  attaining  to  such  a  view  that 


SUMMARY  177 

affords  any  chance  of  avoiding  unconscious  assumptions 
is  the  method  of  trying  to  take  the  simple  fact  of  experi- 
ence and  to  observe  it  in  the  self-explanation  which  the 
activity  of  thought  offers.  We  thus  go  away,  as  far  as 
we  can,  from  hypostatising  our  knowledge  into  the  image 
of  an  instrument  applied  from  without,  and  observe  its 
own  activity. 

2.  In  our  experience,  in  its  fullest  aspect  as  a  form  of 
knowledge,   we  find  that  to  know  means  to  be  neither 
only   subject   nor   only   object,    but   that   these   are   the 
moments  in  a  larger  entirety,  which  is  the  actual  fact  of 
knowledge   within   which   they   are   distinguished.      This 
is  the  fundamental  characteristic  of  reality  in  its  ultimate 
character. 

3.  "  /,"  sought  to  be  taken  per  se  and  out  of  my  con- 
trast to  my  object- world,  is   an  empty  universal,  unreal 
excepting  as  a  moment  in  the  more  comprehensive  entirety. 

4.  What  is  "  not-me,"  when  we  seek  to  exclude  "  me  " 
as  the  other  moment,  is  an  equally  unreal  abstraction. 

5.  But    the    abstract    "  not-me  "    is    not    confined    in 
experience  to  externality,  such  as  that  of  nature  taken  to 
be  in  absolute  externality  in  space  and  time.     For  in 
experience  it  confronts  "  me  "  in  differing  orders.     Within 
each   of  these   we   have   a   principle   reigning,    and   this 
principle  is  never  transcended  in  its  own  order  of  reflection. 
Thus  externality  gives  birth  only  to  externality,  and  not 
to  life  which  implies  an  end  that  is  quite  other  than 
external,  or  to  mind  as  indicative  of  the  order  to  which 
it  belongs  as  a  fact  of  existence.     There  is  never  anything 
that  is  truly  supernatural,  but  there  may  be  experience 
belonging  to  a  different  order  from  that   which  at  the 
moment  confronts  us. 

6.  The  orders  among  objects  progress  from  externality, 
as  in  the  extreme  forms  of  mutually  exclusive  points  in 
space  and  mutually  exclusive  successive  instants  in  the 
time  series,  to  the  finite  centre  of  knowledge,  in  which 
mind  has  its  object  as  mind.     Here  we  have  experience 
of  what  we  call  the  soul. 

7.  Each  individual  object  may  include,  as  does  what 
we  name  the  living  organism,  the  characters  of  a  plurality 
of  orders. 

8.  Self  and  not-self  are  wrongly  conceived  if  visualised 
as  mutually  exclusive  externalities.     They  are  reciprocally 


178        MEANING  AS  ENTERING   INTO  REALITY 

implied  factors  in  self-distinction  by  mind  within  its 
complete  entirety.  The  object  may  have  spatial  and 
temporal  relations  as  indicative  of  certain  orders  of  reality 
expressed  in  it.  But  it  may,  through  the  presence  of 
higher  orders,  be  also  recognised  as  a  self  that  knows, 
finite  because  object  and  as  such  conditioned  in  space  and 
time.  It  implies,  in  that  it  knows,  the  moment  of  the 
subject  in  knowledge.  It  knows,  but  yet  knows  as  here 
and  now.  Our  sense-awareness  illustrates  this,  and  is  a 
feature  in  which  the  externality  to  each  other  of  various 
systems  is  transcended  and  their  congruence  is  rendered 
intelligible.  Thus  we  get  the  "finite  centre." 

9.  Man's  place  in  nature  is  determined,  so  far  as  his 
aspect  is  natural,  by  nature.  Science  generally  and 
evolution  under  the  guiding  influence  of  ends  explain  it. 
But  as  soon  as  we  have  to  take  into  account  the  higher 
aspect  in  which  man  finds  himself  as  personality,  and  says 
"I,"  the  knowledge  that  is  confined  to  nature  as  relatively 
closed  to  mind  is  insufficient  for  the  explanation  of  man's 
position  in  the  cosmos  and  its  signification.  Nature 
taken  as  closed  to  mind  cannot  display  to  us  orders  depend- 
ing on  categories  in  which  we  pass  beyond  an  object 
aspect.  The  ends  that  are  realised  in  us  point  to  such 
categories,  and  our  experience  of  the  soul  and  the  state 
points  to  them  very  definitely.  Such  experience  cannot 
be  explained  as  evolution  based  only  on  succession  and 
causation.  Ends  and  conscious  purposes  are  apparent  in 
its  phenomena. 

I  may  be  reproached  for  the  terms  I  have  employed. 
It  will  be  said  that  they  are  metaphysical  and  obscure.  It 
is  quite  true  that  they  are  metaphysical,  and  they  are 
certainly  not  familiar.  But  it  is  the  very  difficulty  of 
all  metaphysics  that  it  can  never  be  made  intelligible 
by  the  use  of  popular  words.  Such  words  import  pictures 
of  occurrences.  They  always  convey  metaphors,  and  con- 
sequently they  are  always  misleading.  Metaphysics, 
more  than  any  other  branch  of  inquiry,  needs  a  terminology 
of  its  own,  chosen  because  of  its  freedom  from  suggestion. 
What  we  have  to  eliminate,  if  we  would  get  at  the  nature 
of  reality,  is  unconscious  and  illegitimate  assumptions. 
These  prevail  everywhere  in  the  popular  discussions  of  the 
subject.  The  effort  to  avoid  them  requires  no  defence, 
although  it  may  land  us  in  the  use  of  words  not  less  uncouth 


METAPHYSICAL    TERMS  179 

than  those  the  mathematician  uses.  Metaphysics  is  a 
subject  in  its  character  just  as  difficult  as  is  mathematics, 
and  perhaps  more  so.  For  it  is  more  elusive  and  it  requires 
preliminary  study  not  less  thorough.  But  while  the 
necessity  for  these  things  is  conceded  in  the  case  of  mathe- 
matics, in  that  of  metaphysics  it  is  not  conceded.  As  has 
been  observed,  a  cobbler  is  supposed  to  need  a  special 
education,  but  a  philosopher  is  not.  To  interpret  and 
arrange  your  categories  is  more  difficult  than  to  make  a  pair 
of  shoes.  I  am  not  sure  that  it  may  not  be  in  the  end 
more  difficult  than  to  interpret  and  handle  "  tensors  "  and 
the  intricate  equations  in  which  they  appear.  But  little 
account  is  taken  of  this  circumstance.  The  mathema- 
ticians are  kicking  the  metaphysicians  up  the  mountain. 
Rightly,  because  the  mountain  has  to  be  ascended.  But 
the  metaphysicians  at  least  know  where  the  precipices  and 
crevasses  lie.  The  mathematicians  are  ascending  along 
with  their  brethren  into  a  metaphysical  region,  and  it  is 
not  for  them  to  reproach  the  latter  if  they  claim  to  use 
guidebooks  with  a  terminology  less  misleading  than  is 
the  ordinary  language  of  social  intercourse.  The  mathe- 
maticians themselves  have  been  very  particular  on  this 
point.  They  have  what  is,  relatively  speaking,  a  highly 
exact  terminology,  referring  to  symbols  with  which  they 
experiment  as  though  these  were  counters.  The  meta- 
physicians neither  are  nor  can  be  so  well  off.  Their  rela- 
tives must  not  reproach  them  if  they  use  words  which,  if 
they  do  not  easily  convey  exactly  what  is  meant,  at  least 
exclude  what  is  not  meant.  No  doubt  the  atmosphere  is 
a  rarefied  one.  If  you  are  bidden  to  ascend  the  Himalayas 
and  report  on  the  view,  you  anticipate  a  deficient  atmo- 
sphere and  provide  yourself  with  oxygen  apparatus,  as 
cumbersome  as  it  is  indispensable.  No  one  ought  to 
reproach  you  for  so  doing,  or  take  exception  to  the  use  of 
artificial  means  without  being  himself  accustomed  to  the 
exceptional  conditions.  For  this  is  the  only  effective 
method  of  reaching  the  level  at  which  there  becomes 
possible  a  survey  from  these  heights.  It  would  have  been 
well  for  human  knowledge  if  philosophers  had  not  been 
as  timid  as  they  have  often  proved,  and  had  been  able  to 
insist,  as  their  spiritual  relatives  have  done,  on  having  a 
definite  terminology  of  their  own. 

We  may  now  return  to  the  question  of  how  meaning 


180        MEANING  AS   ENTERING  INTO  REALITY 

enters  into  reality,  and  exhibits  order  in  degrees.  We 
know  the  self  that  perceives  as  being  an  object,  sitting  in 
a  chair  it  may  be,  but  in  any  case  falling  within  the  natural 
world  of  objects.  We  have  seen  what  is  meant  by  the 
statement  that  it  is  possible  to  be  at  once  percipient  and 
perceived.  How  can  the  subject  that  knows  be  also  the 
object  that  is  known  ?  For  we  cannot  split  up  reality. 
Is  it  open  to  us  to  look  upon  what  we  perceive  to  be  a  bio- 
logical organism  as  being  also  the  mind  that  perceives  it  ? 
A  way  out  of  the  difficulty  appears  possible  if  existence 
actually  presents  itself  at  stages  or  degrees  which  are 
different  in  kind,  and  if  the  one  system  of  reality  can  there- 
fore appear  in  differing  aspects  which  vary  according  to 
the  order  of  thought  within  which  reality  is  interpreted, 
as  even  in  Einstein's  physical  doctrine.  If,  for  example, 
we  excluded  all  conceptions  excepting  those  of  a  nature 
purely  mechanistic,  an  organism  would  present  the  relation- 
ships of  the  parts  of  a  machine  and  these  only.  The 
physicist  and  the  chemist  work  with  such  conceptions,  and 
for  them  the  organism  is  simply  matter  and  energy,  exhibit- 
ing the  causal  principles  of  physics  and  chemistry  and  con- 
forming to  their  laws.  Approached  in  this  aspect  and 
order  in  reality  there  is  no  reason  to  doubt  that  the  laws  of 
the  conservation  and  degradation  of  energy  will  be  found  to 
be  reigning  unbroken,  or  that  the  uniformities  of  molecular 
structure  will  obtain  here  as  elsewhere  in  the  experience 
of  the  chemist.  But  although  we  accept  this  interpre- 
tation so  far  as  it  goes,  it  does  not  enable  us  to  interpret 
fully  or  even  to  observe  or  describe  a  living  organism.  The 
characteristics  of  such  an  organism  do  not  lie  merely  in  its 
molecular  structure,  and  still  less  in  any  aspect  of  its 
activities  in  which  these  are  related  as  causes  external  to 
their  effects.  Its  composition  is  ever  changing.  It  is 
always  parting  with  its  substance  and  taking  in  fresh  sub- 
stance, while  preserving  its  form  and  life.  Between  itself 
and  the  environment  there  is  no  sharp  or  exact  line  of 
demarcation.  Passage  into  a  different  stage  in  develop- 
ment is  everywhere  apparent.  No  particle  remains  per- 
manently. The  characteristics  of  the  living  creature  have 
come  to  it  by  inheritance,  and  cannot  be  described  in 
mechanistic  terms.  To  claim  that  they  can  be  so  de- 
scribed, excepting  under  violent  abstractions  that  deprive 
the  language  used  of  any  approach  to  adequacy,  is  to  ignore 


DEGREES    IN    WHAT    IS    REAL  181 

the  teaching  both  of  biology  and  of  common  sense.  The 
essence  of  the  nature  of  a  living  organism  lies  in  its  control, 
not  by  external  causes,  but  by  an  end  which  conserves  its 
existence  through  a  definite  course,  commencing  before 
birth  and  terminating  only  in  death.  It  is  the  end  that 
fulfils  itself,  progressively  and  yet  in  a  definite  fashion, 
that  signifies  in  the  organism  in  which  it  expresses  itself 
identity  in  the  life  of  that  organism.  The  organism  main- 
tains that  identity  despite  metabolism  and  the  continuous 
process  of  change  in  material.  It  is  the  end  which  is  the 
characteristic  feature  of  life,  and  which  constitutes  the 
living  being  a  whole  that  gives  their  meaning  to  parts  each 
of  which  performs  a  function  in  that  whole,  and  each  of 
which  has  itself  no  life  excepting  as  a  living  member  of  the 
whole  for  which  it  functions.  The  notion  of  cause  is 
wholly  inapplicable.  The  end  is  nothing  more  than  a 
determining  and  common  behaviour,  which  has  no  reality 
apart  from  the  members  which  live  and  are  nourished  and 
sustained  only  in  maintaining  it.  Yet  it  influences  their 
conduct,  and  keeps  it  constant.  That  is  why  the  organism 
preserves  its  life,  and  does  not  necessarily  stop,  as  a  machine 
might,  because  of  merely  momentary  disturbance  from 
without. 

To  attempt  to  render  such  phenomena  of  everyday 
experience  into  mechanistic  terminology  is,  as  I  have 
already  said,  to  attempt  what  is  impossible.  It  is  only 
in  terms  of  life  that  life  can  be  expressed.  The  end  the 
persistence  and  self-direction  of  which  constitute  its  essence 
does  not  belong  to  the  order  of  externality.  It  is  true  that 
from  a  different  standpoint  the  living  organism  can  be 
treated  as  if  its  relationships  were  merely  those  of  time 
and  space,  and  as  if  it  were  subject  to  their  conditions  in 
the  aspects  which  it  so  presents.  This  is  the  method  by 
which  the  physicist  and  the  chemist  investigate  the 
phenomena  of  life,  and  it  is  fruitful  and  necessary.  But 
it  is  inadequate  to  the  actual.  For  the  living  organism 
has  the  other  aspects  in  which  it  comes  under  different 
orders  in  knowledge  and  reality  alike.  So  far  as  concerns 
the  end,  controlling  the  behaviour  of  what  occupies  both 
space  and  time,  the  difficulty  which  we  encounter  elsewhere 
in  trying  to  conceive  causal  action  at  a  distance  has  no 
application.  For  the  end  is  ideal.  It  is,  as  I  have  already 
said,  more  analogous  to  the  disciplined  common  purpose 


182        MEANING  AS   ENTERING   INTO   REALITY 

of  an  army  than  to  an  external  cause.  It  is  everywhere 
present,  and  it  is  also  present  in  every  instant  of  growth 
and  in  every  point  of  development,  bringing  the  future  to 
actuality  in  the  circumstances  of  the  present.  It  is  no 
influence  operating  ab  extra  that  we  are  here  dealing  with, 
any  more  than  on  the  other  hand  it  is  the  consciously 
selected  purpose  of  a  being  that  exercises  intelligent  self- 
control.  We  are  concerned  with  a  concept  that  belongs 
only  to  biological  science,  and  not  to  physics,  on  the  one 
hand,  nor  to  the  region  of  mind,  on  the  other.  This  con- 
clusion seems  at  least  in  harmony  with  our  actual  observa- 
tion and  experience.  What  its  theoretical  possibility 
implies  we  shall  consider  presently.  The  point  at  this 
stage  is  that  even  as  a  mere  biological  fact  the  individual 
who  sits  in  the  chair  is  unintelligible  if  the  only  concepts 
available  for  his  interpretation  are  those  of  mechanism. 
Indeed,  we  may  go  further.  If  we  concede,  for  the  sake  of 
argument,  the  validity  of  the  dubious  distinction  between 
a  character  that  is  non-mental  and  one  that  is  analogous 
to  that  of  mind,  then  the  individual  human  organism 
may  well,  in  respect  of  its  character,  be  assigned  to  the 
mental  world.  It  is  less  difficult  to  conceive  it  as  having 
a  variety  of  aspects  if  each  of  these  can  possess  only 
relative  reality. 

When  we  turn  from  the  phenomena  of  mere  life  to  those 
of  mind,  we  are  faced  by  what  is  analogous.  In  the  pre- 
ceding chapter  it  was  pointed  out  that  the  personality  of 
the  individual  John  Smith  rested  in  the  correspondence, 
the  identity  despite  difference,  between  his  thinking  and 
that  of  his  neighbours.  John  Smith  is  an  animal,  but  it 
is  not  as  an  animal  that  he  is  my  friend.  It  is  as  a  man  ; 
that  is,  as  a  freely  and  intelligently  selecting  mind. 
Neither  his  physical  nor  his  biological  aspect  or  qualities 
avail  to  make  him  this  ;  but  only  those  that  belong  to  the 
orders  in  knowledge  that  are  implied  in  the  experience  I  have 
in  him  of  what  is  intellectual,  moral,  and  spiritual.  We 
saw  that  it  is  not  through  mere  sense-particulars  that  these 
are  apprehended.  It  is  only  by  interpretation  that  can 
yield  meaning,  and  that  depends  on  actual  identity  in  the 
conceptions  of  thought.  The  signs  interpreted  have  to  be 
significant  of  such  conceptions  as  being  identically  present 
in  the  mind  of  my  friend  as  well  as  in  my  own  mind,  and 
the  access  is  by  way  of  reflection  and  memory. 


HOW    MIND    BECOMES    AWARE    OF    MIND     183 

It  is  thus  that  mind  becomes  aware  of  mind.  Each 
mind  has  an  aspect  in  which  it  is  object  for  the  other,  an 
object  interpreted,  however,  to  signify  another  subject  in 
knowledge,  the  "  I  "  particularised  in  form.  The  self  is 
expressed  in  a  physical  organism  whose  behaviour  we 
construe  as  meaning  what  our  own  personality  means  for 
us.  It  is  thus  that  we  attach  significance  to  its  signs,  and 
render  its  language.  But,  in  so  far  as  these  embody 
meaning,  it  is  only  for  developed  intelligence  that  they 
embody  it.  They  are  phenomena  of  what,  in  aspects  per- 
taining to  a  different  order,  belongs  to  the  merely  external. 
All  aspects  must  be  co-present  for  reflection  that  is  fully 
comprehensive.  The  apprehension  of  the  actual  in  its 
integrity  requires  them  all.  But  they  do  not,  when  taken 
in  isolation,  constitute  fragments  of  the  actual,  existing 
externally  to  and  independently  of  each  other.  The  actual 
object  the  aspects  of  which  are  thus  collectively  presented 
is  no  arithmetical  collection  of  these  aspects.  It  is  an 
entirety  interpreted  from  points  of  view  which  differ  in 
their  logical  character,  and  belong  to  different  orders  in 
knowledge,  no  one  of  which  is  reducible  to  the  other,  how- 
ever much  it  may  require  its  presence.  Here  again  we 
seem  to  encounter,  not  the  result  of  any  metaphysical 
theory,  but  a  fact  which  everyday  experience  forces  on  us. 
It  would  seem  as  though  we  could  only  hope  to  get  at  the 
entirety  of  the  actual  by  leaving  knowledge  to  exhibit  its 
own  implications,  and  to  develop  itself  free  from  constraint 
of  standpoint  and  of  consequent  relativity  in  conception. 
But  knowledge,  though  in  its  final  nature  both  free  and 
creative,  yet  at  our  actual  level  in  its  own  hierarchy  reveals 
itself  for  us  only  as  subjected  to  the  organic  conditions  which 
belong  to  its  finiteness  as  human  knowledge,  and  it  is 
accordingly  only  by  hypothesis  and  experiment,  and  by 
reasoning  that  is  in  the  first  instance  relational  and  dis- 
cursive, that  as  human  beings  we  can  do  our  work. 

If  the  complaint  is  made  that  I  have  not  defined  more 
fully  the  nature  of  knowledge  as  thus  alleged  to  be  founda- 
tional,  and  I  am  asked  to  describe  it  in  familiar  terms, 
my  answer  is  that  the  request  so  made  is  misplaced.  For 
knowledge  as  that  foundational  fact  cannot  be  described 
in  terms  of  anything  beyond  itself.  Its  conception  is  an 
ultimate  one,  within  which  both  subject  and  object  fall. 
We  are  all  of  us  prone  to  lapse  into  the  psychological  attitude 


184        MEANING  AS   ENTERING   INTO  REALITY 

and  to  try  to  hold  out  for  examination  mind  as  though  it 
could  be  looked  on  as  a  thing.  But  when  we  do  this  we  fall 
into  the  clutches  of  relativity,  and  it  is  just  about  what 
can  only  be  relative  truth  that  I  am  endeavouring  to  offer  a 
warning.  Attempts  have  been  made  to  exhibit  in  syste- 
matic and  complete  form  the  entirety  of  knowledge  in 
final  fulness,  by  observing  its  self -development  without 
introducing  the  confining  and  distorting  standpoint  of  any 
special  science.  Whether  these  attempts  have  succeeded 
is  doubtful.  To  this  question  we  shall  return  later.  Mean- 
time it  may  be  admitted  freely  that  "knowledge  "  is  a  word 
that  is  apt  to  mislead.  But  it  is  probably  the  best  term 
available,  and  it  is  doubtful  whether  vov?  or  Wissenschaft 
is  more  free  from  reproach.  All  three  words  may  be  so 
used  as  to  suggest  not  unnaturally  relative  and  not 
ultimate  reality. 

In  every  phase  knowledge  depends  on  interpretation. 
Its  concern  is  meaning.  The  meanings  belong  to  different 
orders  of  thought.  Do  they  also  belong  to  different  orders 
in  reality  ?  Surely  it  is  impossible  to  doubt  this,  if  meaning 
is  really  involved  in  the  actuality  of  experience.  John 
Smith  is  certainly  real.  So  is  the  living  organism.  So  are 
the  relations  apart  from  which  events  would  be  non- 
existent. So  is  beauty  and  so  is  sin.  No  theory  of  sub- 
jective idealism  can,  as  we  have  already  seen,  separate 
meaning  from  experience  without  lapsing  into  an  im- 
practicable scepticism.  Nor  is  it  in  the  least  apparent  how 
to  relegate  all  these  aspects  of  reality  to  a  non-mental 
world,  distinguished  as  existing  in  separation  from  any 
percipient  object  and  acted  on  by  it  in  a  mere  relation  of 
external  causation. 

What  ordinary  common  sense  believes  seems  to  be 
what  it  is  also  most  natural  to  believe.  The  universe 
appears  to  us,  unlike  some  of  our  Victorian  predecessors, 
as  but  one  entirety.  I  apprehend  it  and  myself  within 
it.  But  this  I  do  through  reflection,  by  mediate  know- 
ledge, for  although  I  apprehend  to  a  certain  extent 
directly  through  my  senses,  I  do  so  only  in  so  far  as  I 
interpret  what  my  senses  tell  me.  The  direct  data  with 
which  these  can  furnish  me  are  limited  by  the  conditions 
of  my  organism.  These  data  have  reality  for  me  through 
feeling  indeed,  but  through  feeling  interpreted.  By  fuller 
reflection,  reflection  which  proceeds  in  an  ever-increasing 


KNOWLEDGE    IN    ITS    FULNESS  185 

degree  inferentially  and  through  general  ideas,  I  can  pro- 
ceed beyond  apparent  immediacy,  and  extend  the  inter- 
pretation and  the  meanings  which  come  to  me  through  it. 
It  is  thus  that  I  conceive  the  full  universe.  In  the  first 
stage  the  conceptions  and  categories  which  I  employ, 
when  I  try  to  apprehend  systematically,  are  few  and  simple. 
But  as  interpretation  proceeds  I  require  more  of  them, 
including  many  that  belong  to  different  orders  in  thought. 
We  do  not  always  find  the  various  orders  follow  on  each 
other  in  time  according  to  their  logical  sequence.  The 
child  may  think  of  its  mother  as  some  sort  of  personality 
before  it  thinks  of  her  as  the  efficient  cause  of  its  sur- 
roundings. But  reality  is  not  thereby  divorced  from 
knowledge  of  reality.  The  percipient  is  an  object  in  his 
universe,  but  it  is  still  the  universe  including  himself  that 
is  there  for  him,  and  for  its  meaning  it  implies  the  presence 
of  mind. 

We  have  now  been  brought  face  to  face  with  the  full 
problem  of  knowledge.  The  solution  suggested  is  one 
which  has  the  merit  of  being  in  substance  an  old  one  that 
has  satisfied,  not  only  some  of  the  most  acute  of  modern 
thinkers,  but  the  metaphysicians  of  ancient  Greece  in 
their  greatest  periods.  For  these,  too,  entertained  views 
in  which  knowing  and  the  known  are  not  regarded  as 
separate  or  separable  entities,  or  knowledge  as  a  mere 
instrument  that  is  taken  up  or  laid  down  at  pleasure,  and 
applied  ab  extra  to  get  at  reality  of  a  character  independent 
of  it.  With  the  thinkers  to  whom  I  refer  knowledge  in 
its  fulness  did  not  exclude  any  phase  of  varying  forms 
of  intelligence.  To  feel  and  to  will  and  to  think  were 
not  activities  belonging  to  separate  faculties.  The 
theoretical  and  the  practical  were  not  divorced  in  intelli- 
gence ;  for  they  appeared  to  these  thinkers  simply  as 
different  fashions  in  which  it  realised  its  ends,  fashions 
which  we  distinguish  only  in  our  imagery.  Such  imagery 
is  the  natural  procedure  of  mind  as  expressing  itself 
through  the  senses  and  by  the  organism,  a  form  in  which 
its  nature  appears  in  degrees  of  reality  which  are  not  the 
highest.  But,  in  the  result,  outside  the  activity  of  mind 
in  knowledge  there  exists  nothing  in  any  intelligible  sense, 
and  all  differences  in  kind  of  truth  are  the  outcome  of  this 
activity.  For  to  truth  belong,  as  we  saw,  more  standards 
than  one.  If  the  standard  is  one  of  value  we  accept  its 


186        MEANING  AS  ENTERING   INTO   REALITY 

results  because  we  cannot  do  otherwise.  The  conscious- 
ness of  difference  in  values  seems  to  belong  to  mind  at  a 
level  where  it  is  more  than  it  appears  to  be  merely  in  our 
conditioned  selves,  and  in  which  it  imposes  on  us  truth 
and  system  just  because  such  truth  and  system  are  the 
foundations  on  which  is  built  up  our  individual  knowledge, 
with  its  freedom  to  err  as  readily  as  to  go  aright.  It  is 
thus  from  above,  from  levels  that  are  qualitatively  higher 
than  our  conditioned  selves,  and  are  not  dependent  on 
our  individual  vagaries,  that  we  draw  the  guidance  required 
for  even  daily  life,  and  realise  that  the  idea  that  is  to  prove 
true  must  be  one  that  when  tested  proves  adequate  in  all 
respects,  theoretical  and  practical  alike. 

The  essence  of  even  finite  mind,  that  is  of  mind  in  the 
form  of  an  organism,  is  that  such  a  mind  is  free.  It  is 
because  such  freedom  is  inherent  in  the  very  nature  of 
mind  at  every  level  that  we  can  choose  error  or  truth,  sin 
or  righteousness. 

We  have,  I  hope,  now  got  some  light  for  the  solution  of 
the  problem  which  pressed  itself  on  us,  the  problem  of 
how  the  subject  that  knows  can  be  at  the  same  time  an 
object  known.  It  turns  out  in  the  end  to  be  a  question 
of  the  categories  employed,  resulting  from  standpoints 
that  are  not  mutually  exclusive.  Here,  as  in  other 
respects,  we  are  always  more  than  we  take  ourselves  to  be. 

As  I  sit  in  my  chair  I  am  not  merely  an  "I,"  a  subject, 
but  I  am  one  among  many  objects  in  nature.  The  mental 
character  which  as  such  an  object  I,  who  am  also  subject, 
possess  in  common  with  my  neighbours,  makes  me  judge 
the  world  in  harmony  with  them.  That  world  lies  before 
me,  and  it  is  by  my  private  judgment  in  the  main  accepted 
as  what  it  is  by  that  of  my  neighbours.  Because  I  and 
they  are  minds  thinking  identical  or  corresponding 
thoughts,  there  is  the  same  world  for  all  of  us.  Only  to 
a  madman  does  what  appears  unquestionable  to  us  seem 
otherwise,  and  he  is  mad  under  the  distortion  it  may  be 
of  physical  causes.  Of  course  even  healthy  individuals 
vary.  The  limits  within  which  we  recognise  the  activity 
of  mind  as  sane  are  very  wide.  Insight  to  an  extent  which 
agreeing  with  yet  predominates  over  ordinary  insight  may 
indeed  be  possessed  only  at  a  price.  A  man  of  genius  may 
be  predominantly  sane  in  what  he  tells  us,  for  his  grasp  of 
what  we  recognise  as  of  the  highest  of  values  may  be  greater 


GENIUS  187 

than  ours.  But  the  price  he  has  paid  for  his  self-concen- 
tration may  have  been  such  as  to  render  him  eccentric. 
Napoleon  and  Attila  did  not  judge  or  act  as  do  other 
men,  nor  did  John  the  Baptist  or  St.  Francis  of  Assisi, 
or  Browning's  "  Grammarian."  And  yet  in  their  own 
ways  all  these  were  supersane,  though  only  in  the  orders 
of  reflection  in  which  they  excelled.  As  ordinary  human 
beings,  as  husbands  and  fathers,  they  would  possibly  have 
turned  out  deficient.  But  each  of  them  had  power  of  a 
kind  that  enabled  him  to  move  easily  in  a  certain  region 
in  which  smaller  men  would  have  striven  vainly  to  move. 
They  were  genuinely  specialists.  Napoleon  would  have 
been  but  a  poor  evangelist,  and  John  the  Baptist  would 
probably  have  proved  to  be  a  dubious  leader  at  Austerlitz. 
Their  specialism  consisted  in  their  power  of  exercising 
mastery,  each  in  his  own  region,  over  certain  concepts 
and  images.  They  were  supermen  in  the  sense  that  hi 
one  direction  or  the  other  a  greater  power  of  mind  in  them 
marked  them  off  from  those  around  them.  Yet  the  con- 
cepts and  images  of  the  greatest  men  of  genius  are  only  such 
as  man's  position  in  nature  permits,  and  their  own  resem- 
blance to  the  rest  of  humanity  far  exceeds  their  divergence 
from  it.  The  concepts  and  images  of  such  men  are 
theoretically  within  the  range  of  the  most  ordinary  indi- 
vidual. That  they  can  be  understood  and  are  held  in 
esteem  by  ordinary  men  establishes  this.  Again,  the 
normal  limits  of  human  individuality  are  partly  physical. 
A  headache  or  a  toothache  may  hamper  our  capacity  to 
think.  In  sleep  consciousness  does  not  cease,  but  my 
awareness  of  my  bodily  position  and  the  operation  of  my 
senses  in  keeping  me  in  communion  with  my  surroundings 
are  interrupted.  We  alter  in  intellectual  capacity  from 
time  to  time  during  the  twenty-four  hours  in  response  to 
external  conditions.  Even  the  absence  of  sunshine  may 
make  the  difference  that  Goethe  declared  that  it  made  to 
his  power  of  composition.  Thus  it  is  not  merely  want  of 
concepts  and  images,  or  of  access  to  these  of  higher  orders, 
that  hems  us  in.  It  is  the  physical  aspect  of  the  self,  an 
aspect  on  which  we,  in  that  we  belong  to  the  object-world 
of  nature,  are  dependent  for  the  expression  of  that  self. 
And  this  is  true  not  the  less  although  in  a  different  aspect, 
belonging  to  a  different  level,  we  are  free  mind. 

The  animal  that  runs  by  my  side  has  intelligence,  and 


188        MEANING  AS   ENTERING  INTO  REALITY 

he  is  in  contact  with  his  environment  through  his  sense 
of  smell  to  an  extent  which  I  am  not  and  cannot  be.  In 
so  far  his  world  includes  more  than  mine  does.  But  in 
his  case  there  is  a  limitation  of  mental  individuality  pro- 
portionate to  his  lack  of  concepts  and  of  images.  The 
larger  orders  of  reflection  do  not  exist  for  him.  His 
universe  is  a  restricted  universe.  He  knows  nothing,  for 
instance,  of  wars  or  strikes.  What  he  does  not  experience, 
because  he  cannot  construct  it  in  thought,  is  thus  for  him 
non-existent.  He  is  confined  to  what  is  relatively  immediate 
awareness  through  sensation  in  a  fashion  which  I  am  not. 
For  in  my  case  there  is  a  capacity,  which  he  does  not 
share,  for  reflection  that  is  mediate,  and  that  is  operative 
through  concepts  and  images  of  an  order  he  cannot 
command. 

The  system  of  my  experience  and  of  the  knowledge  in 
which  it  is  sustained  is,  on  the  other  hand,  restricted  in  my 
own  case  by  the  special  features  of  my  organism.  I  can 
conceive  of  beings  intelligent  as  I  am,  but  with  senses  of 
a  different  nature.  Such  beings  may  perceive  in  a 
fashion  which  I  cannot  even  imagine.  Moreover,  they  may 
be  endowed  with  a  brain-power  capable  of  rendering 
itself  more  effectively  than  mine  the  organ  of  sustained 
thought.  Both  in  immediate  and  in  mediate  comprehension 
such  beings,  if  they  exist,  will  be  my  superiors. 

But  if  such  beings  do  exist  it  appears  clear  that  they 
are  included  in  one  and  the  same  universe  with  myself. 
For  it  is  only  through  reflection  that  their  possible  existence 
has  any  meaning  for  me,  or  mine  for  them.  In  this 
respect  they  resemble  John  Smith.  I  conceive  of  them  as 
setting  in  thoughts  that  correspond  to  my  own  and  are 
in  so  far  identical  with  them,  an  experience  the  general 
structure  of  which,  for  intelligence,  is  just  that  of  my 
own  mind,  and  which  differs  from  my  experience  only  in 
its  details.  Such  experiences  are  thus  based  on  identity, 
the  identity  that  characterises  mind  throughout  and 
relates  it  to  itself  in  its  objects.  To  speak  of  numerically 
different  universes  is  thus  to  use  language  that  has  no 
meaning. 

As  I  sit  in  my  chair  and  envisage  myself  as  an  object 
that  is  a  mind  in  my  world,  I  am  therefore  actually  mind 
conscious  of  mind,  although  I  am  contemplating  it  under 
the  limiting  influence  of  relativity.  I  am  indeed  in  truth 


MIND    AS    OBJECT  189 

and  in  fact  more  than  I  take  myself  in  so  doing  to  be.  I 
refer  my  knowledge  back  to  an  "  I."  In  so  far  I  am  no 
longer  chained  to  the  view  that  all  that  comes  into  reflec- 
tion is  of  object  character.  I  have  distinguished  my 
object-world  from  the  mind  that  contemplates  it.  But 
I  have  done  so  only  to  reintroduce  that  mind,  the  subject 
for  which  my  world  is  its  object,  as  in  another  aspect 
itself  object.  To  regard  this  view  as  final  is  impossible, 
for  I  can  discover  no  expression  in  which  to  define  know- 
ledge as  being  a  causal  operation  in  the  space  and  time  in 
which  the  object- world  presents  itself  to  me.  It  is  in 
that  I  know  that  I  exist.  The  relation  of  knowledge  is 
presupposed  in  every  attempt  to  present  it  in  causal  form. 
It  is  the  foundation  on  which  reality  and  unreality  alike, 
truth  and  error,  beauty  and  ugliness,  righteousness  and 
sin,  all  rest.  Each  of  these  presupposes  knowledge  as 
the  medium  in  which  they  are  and  have  meaning.  That 
is  what  is  intended  when  it  is  called  "  foundational."  It 
is  the  entirety  within  which  they  appear  as  its  aspects, 
at  stages  in  relativity  that  make  them  all  stand  for  degrees 
of  unreality.  The  truth  is  the  whole  and  these  are  but 
partial  truths.  I  know  as  I  find  myself  situated.  My 
own  knowledge  is  the  "  that  "  from  which  I  have  to  make 
my  start.  Get  behind  it  I  cannot.  My  daily  task  is  to 
explain  what  it  is,  and  the  consequent  signification  of  the 
fact  of  my  being  the  finite  centre  that  I  am. 

This  is  the  position  in  experience  and  in  the  system  that 
contains  experience  as  an  aspect  falling  within  it,  the 
aspect  of  the  self  that  as  experienced  contemplates  from 
a  chair.  Because  it  is  a  self  that  contemplates  from  a 
chair,  the  St.  James's  Park  and  Carlton  Terrace  limit  its 
horizon.  Because  it  signifies  a  self  that  is  more  than 
merely  such  as  sits  in  a  chair,  there  are  the  unseen  part 
of  the  Metropolis,  the  world,  and  the  universe  beyond. 
These  exist  for  it  inasmuch  as  the  character  of  mind,  even 
in  finite  form,  is  to  have  freedom  from  its  limitations, 
not  in  immediate  apprehension,  but  in  mediate  reflection. 
The  unstinted  range  and  might  of  thought  enable  it  to 
transcend  the  limits  which  the  senses  and  the  situation 
impose.  But  even  in  reflection  on  the  world  of  the  most 
abstract  character,  the  mind  is  looking  for  the  revelation 
of  its  own  character  in  its  object.  The  freedom  of  our 
minds  is  no  freedom  in  vain  imagining.  In  our  efforts 

14 


190        MEANING  AS   ENTERING   INTO  REALITY 

after  knowledge  we  are  compelled  to  look  for  system  in 
what  is  before  us,  system  which  is  no  creature  of  our 
private  reflections.  Our  unfreedom  is  of  the  sort  which 
all  who  are  truly  free  impose  on  themselves.  They  en- 
deavour to  think  systematically  and  in  harmony  with 
principles  which  mind  itself  produces  and  imposes  on 
itself.  It  is  so  that  the  harmony  which  is  required  by 
truth  is  found.  A  purely  arbitrary  procedure  in  know- 
ledge is  the  procedure  of  error,  and,  because  mind  abhors 
error,  it  renounces  the  arbitrary,  and  seeks  for  the  order- 
liness in  thought  that  is  inherently  characteristic  of  its 
nature. 

Because  the  object-world  is  in  this  fashion  included 
in  the  entirety,  and  knowledge,  so  far  from  being  a  process 
of  intervention  between  that  world  and  the  self,  in  truth 
overlaps  both,  there  is  no  gap  between  the  character  of  the 
object  and  that  of  the  mind  for  which  it  is  there.  It  is 
only  in  virtue  of  distinctions  created  within  what  is  a 
whole  that  these  characters  are  marked  off  from  each  other. 
They  are  different  in  so  far  as  the  standpoints  from  which 
they  are  apprehended  are  standpoints  which  imply  con- 
ceptions of  different  orders.  But  the  distinctions  are  not 
between  independent  entities,  but  between  independent 
aspects  in  the  presentations,  at  their  respective  stand- 
points within  the  entirety.  It  follows  that  there  is  no  real 
problem  raised  as  to  the  possibility  or  the  genesis  of  know- 
ledge, and  that  the  question  as  to  how  knowledge  is  to  be 
explained  as  the  outcome  of  facts  antecedent  to  it  in 
logic  and  in  time  and  space  is  one  which  is  wholly  irrational. 
The  world  of  nature  is  there,  just  as  it  seems,  and  the  self 
in  the  chair  is  there  just  as  it  seems.  The  only  legitimate 
questions  are  those  raised  as  to  the  fashion  in  which  they 
present  the  aspects  which  they  do. 

If  the  character  and  the  quality  of  the  object- world  be 
such  as  has  now  been  suggested,  a  good  many  difficulties 
disappear.  What  we  know  is  neither  only  the  particular 
of  immediate  awareness  through  sense,  nor  the  universal 
formulated  and  hypos  tat  ised  in  reflection.  It  is  that 
which  partakes  by  its  nature  of  both  characters,  the 
individual  or  singular  object  which  is  there  not  more  for 
thought  than  it  is  for  sense,  or  for  sense  than  it  is  for 
thought.  In  that  object  particular  and  universal  do  not 
exist  in  isolation.  They  have  no  meaning  and  cannot  be 


SENSATION  AND  REFLECTION  INSEPARABLE     191 

even  expressed  in  such  isolation.  When  we  think,  even  as 
we  believe,  wholly  abstractly,  imagination  has  really  come 
to  our  aid,  and  we  are  thinking  in  images,  images  fashioned 
freely,  like  the  symbols  of  the  mathematician,  to  accord 
with  principles  of  general  application  that  are  implicit. 
The  object  of  knowledge  has  just  for  this  very  reason  been 
denned  in  philosophy  as  the  concrete  universal,  as  in  other 
words  implying  mind,  and  this  it  is  under  all  conditions. 
It  follows  that  sense  and  reflection  are  inseparable  for 
us.  It  is  no  objection  to  the  recognition  of  what  is  held  to 
be  real  that  it  is  only  through  reflection,  aiding  itself  by 
moulding  images  to  its  purposes,  that  we  can  recognise 
that  reality.  This  conclusion  tends  to  supersede  many 
controversies,  including  those  that  we  encountered  in  the 
case  of  the  space-time  continuum.  The  difficulty  there 
arose  from  the  protagonists  having  treated  as  being  one 
only  for  the  methods  of  mathematics  a  question  that  was 
really  for  the  methods  of  metaphysics.  If  the  assump- 
tion, implied  if  not  expressly  made,  that  the  mind  is  a  sort 
of  thing  which  is  looking  at  another  sort  of  thing  called 
nature,  be  in  ultimate  analysis  superfluous  and  really  un- 
meaning, then  it  does  not  matter  whether  it  is  by  direct 
perception  or  only  by  inference  that  we  find  the  space- 
time  continuum  as  something  actually  present  in  nature. 
It  is  a  conception  which  is  required  in  order  to  elicit  the 
harmony  of  experience.  To  quote  Einstein's  own  descrip- 
tion of  the  treatment  of  the  subject  by  Minkowski :  "  From 
a  *  happening  '  in  three-dimensional  space,  physics  becomes, 
as  it  were,  an  '  existence  '  in  the  four-dimensional  world." 
Such  existence  has  of  course  to  be  ascertained  by  observa- 
tion and  experiment.  No  other  method  is  worth  much  or 
can  be  relied  on.  But  what  we  thus  discover  and  observe 
is  no  mere  particular  of  sense.  It  is  the  finding  of  itself 
in  its  object  by  mind.  The  test  of  truth  is  its  adequacy 
for  the  explanation  of  experience,  and  for  the  description 
of  what  has  a  unique  character  in  that  experience.  It  is 
in  terms  of  conceptual  knowledge  alone  that  we  can 
describe  what  we  cannot  recognise  by  sight  or  touch  as  an 
object  per  se.  But  the  description  is  not  less  one  of  an 
"It,"  of  something  actual,  which  we  diagnose  as  the 
explanation  of  phenomena,  as  we  do  in  the  cases  of  atoms 
and  electrons.  It  is  real  in  just  the  same  fashion  as  they 
are.  For  its  recognition  is  a  necessity  of  knowledge  as  it 


192        MEANING  AS   ENTERING   INTO   REALITY 

stands  to-day  and  is  our  guide  in  our  belief  in  what  is  real. 
A  working  hypothesis  the  space-time  activity  no  doubt  is. 
But  it  is  the  hypothesis  which  the  principles  of  mathe- 
matical physics  as  they  now  stand  appear  to  compel  us  to 
regard  as  an  hypothesis  which  not  only  works  in  practice 
but  is  true  of  reality. 

If  we  rid  our  minds  of  the  idea  that  in  nature  reality  is 
confined  to  isolated  entities  which  we  somehow  ought  to  be 
able  to  get  at  in  direct  perception,  and  which  stand  in 
merely  independently  conceived  or  external  relations  to 
each  other,  it  is  not  difficult  to  accept  the  space-time  con- 
tinuum as  being  the  basis  of  physical  nature,  provided, 
that  is,  we  have  reached  a  standpoint  in  our  investigations 
from  which  physical  reality  cannot  receive  a  full  or  con- 
sistent meaning  without  the  hypothesis.  This  is  because 
the  character  of  reality  is  that  of  the  concrete  universal, 
for  the  recognition  of  which  reflection  is  required  as  much 
as  is  sense.  Nature  is  there.  From  a  definite  standpoint 
which  has  its  place  among  the  varying  exhibitions  of  the 
relativity  of  knowledge  it  is  independent  of  and  appears 
closed  to  the  observer.  But  not  the  less  its  texture  is 
bound  to  be  as  much  for  him  conceptual  as  it  is  sensuous. 
For  both  of  these  aspects  have  their  places  within  the 
entirety  of  knowledge. 


CHAPTER    IX 

APPEARANCE   AND    REALITY 

WE  have  now  before  us  reasons  for  thinking  that  nature 
can  be  no  self-contained  entity  apart  from  mind.  It  is  in 
and  through  mind  that  it  attains  reality.  The  orders  of 
nature  are  consequently  not  limited  to  those  of  externality. 
The  full  universe,  of  colour,  of  sound,  of  beauty,  is  not 
presented  exclusively  or  adequately  in  any  such  forms. 
Other  qualities  clamour  at  our  doors,  and  solely  in  virtue 
of  our  abstractions  do  we  shut  them  out.  It  is  only  in  a 
shower  of  metaphors  that  we  suggest  as  explanatory  of 
what  is  actual  the  ideas  of  the  world  of  the  pure  physicist. 
Such  a  world  is  no  real  world. 

If  our  knowledge  could  be  perfected  we  should  have 
before  us  as  completed  in  their  entire  system  the  orders 
that  contribute  to  what  confronts  us.  Only  by  a  divorce 
that  except  for  strictly  limited  purposes  is  unjustifiable  can 
we  divide  the  mind  that  is  at  home  in  each  and  all  of  these 
orders  from  its  object.  As  that  object  more  and  more 
suggests  to  us  degrees  of  a  progressively  less  abstract 
character,  it  approximates  the  more  closely  to  the  nature 
of  mind  itself,  and  the  division  between  the  two  fades.  In 
human  personality  mind  finds  itself  for  us  more  fully  than 
in  any  outside  thing.  What  it  finds  here  is  indeed  of  its 
own  inmost  nature.  Man  exists,  in  being  and  knowing 
alike,  at  degrees  in  reality  which  belong  to  the  domain  of 
mind,  and  are  not  merely  such  as  characterise  physical 
nature.  It  is  accordingly  only  by  a  procedure  resembling 
that  of  the  Victorian  bifurcationists  that  we  can  separate 
nature  sharply  off  from  intelligence.  It  is  similarly  that 
we  divide  the  self  from  its  human  form.  In  truth  these 
are  not  separate  entities.  They  are  appearances  in  different 
orders  of  knowledge.  At  its  higher  level  in  reflection  the 
human  organism  appears  as  the  self,  and  it  is  only  at  other 

193 


194  APPEARANCE   AND   REALITY 

levels  in  our  reflections,  at  which  also  we  apprehend  it, 
that  it  presents  the  appearance  of  a  particular  self  instead 
of  self  simply.  The  identity  in  thought  that  characterises 
myself  and  my  friend  renders  intelligible  how  a  plurality 
of  selves  is  possible.  It  is  a  plurality  with  physical  aspects 
the  source  of  which  is  man's  place  in  nature.  The  identity, 
on  the  other  hand,  that  underlies  such  a  plurality  of  actual 
selves  and  explains  it  has  for  its  origin  the  relation  of 
nature  to  mind  as  its  completion. 

I  am  a  particular  person  with  a  name,  and  a  past  and  a 
kinship  to  others,  as  well  as  a  situation  in  which  I  am  here 
and  now.  So  far  I  might  be  described  almost  as  a  mere 
organism  might  be.  But  I  cannot  be  adequately  so 
described,  for  none  of  these  facts  about  me  are  separable 
from  the  other  fact  that  they  belong  to  me  as  a  human 
personality,  a  self,  a  mind.  As  such  I  have  the  sense  that 
I  am  more  than  even  this,  and  that  there  is  implied  a  yet 
higher  degree  than  that  of  my  appearance  as  a  separate 
self  in  the  experience  of  myself  and  others.  I  find  pressed 
on  me,  in  art,  in  religion,  in  thinking,  the  ideal  of  person- 
ality and  of  mind  as  at  a  different  level  on  which  my  world 
is  not  divided  from  myself  as  at  first  sight  it  seems  to  be. 
Potentially  at  least  I  can  comprehend  this  ideal,  not  "  as 
through  a  glass,  darkly,"  but  in  reflection,  which  if  abstract 
is  capable  of  realising  the  limits  by  which  human  know- 
ledge is  marked  off  from  knowledge  as  conceivable.  Within 
an  individuality  in  which  all  the  degrees  in  reality  and  their 
resulting  relations  were  harmonised,  subject  and  object 
would  ideally  come  together,  and  the  distinction  between 
them  would  disclose  itself  as  one  wholly  within  the  self. 
This  is  a  conception  which  reflection  itself  suggests  to  us 
with  increasing  importunity. 

For  the  animals  below  me  such  questions  do  not  arise. 
Reality  is  for  them  confined  to  orders  that  do  not  admit 
of  them,  for  they  do  not  reach  to  the  level  in  knowledge 
that  is  man's.  In  the  case  of  beings,  if  such  there  be,  of  a 
higher  order  the  difficulties  in  recognising  the  object  as  in 
complete  harmony  with  mind  may  be  less.  But  as  mind 
is  ever  differentiating  itself  for  us  mortals  in  the  processes 
that  arise  in  its  self-distinctions,  the  complete  solution  of 
all  differences  can  belong  fully  to  mind  only  at  the  highest 
level  reason  can  compass,  a  level  where  thinking  and 
creation  must  be  contemplated  as  indistinguishable.  Such 


THE    FINITE    CENTRE    AGAIN  195 

a  level  we  do  not  attain  in  the  place  in  experience  that 
is  ours.  That  place  is  one  here  and  now,  and  affords  the 
only  foothold  that  is  actual  in  our  daily  experience  as  men. 
It  is  but  reflectively,  by  thought  which  can  spread  its  wings 
and  fly  beyond  the  limits  of  what  appears  immediately, 
that  we  can  explore  the  self  in  a  fuller  significance.  In 
each  case  the  significance  and  the  reality  are  the  same. 
That  is  the  outcome  of  the  doctrine  of  relativity  and  its 
completion. 

Such  a  view  is  what  is  indicated  if  we  refuse  to  treat 
nature  as  finally  self-contained,  or,  more  generally,  if  we 
decline  to  regard  object  as  really  divorceable  from  subject. 

In  the  preceding  chapters  I  have  sought  to  throw  some 
light  upon  what  is  meant  by  speaking  of  the  fact  of  know- 
ledge as  an  ultimate  and  foundational  fact.  Behind  the 
fact  that  we  know  we  cannot  get ;  cogito,  sum,  not  cogito, 
ergo  sum.  To  ask  what  is  the  explanation  of  the  fact  that 
I  know  is  therefore  an  irrational  question.  Of  course  it  is 
true  that  we  can  trace  in  the  external  forms  of  nature  the 
growth  of  the  intelligent  organism  and  of  its  activity  in 
becoming  conscious.  For  in  so  far  as  this  growth  takes 
place  it  is  akin  to  that  of  the  nervous  system  and  the  senses, 
and  these  belong  to  nature.  In  recognising  this  the  view 
of  the  "  Behaviourists  "  is  as  legitimate  as  it  is  essential. 
But  it  is  a  view  only  of  the  growth  of  mind  as  it  discovers 
itself  in  nature  ;  and  nature  presupposes  the  experience 
apart  from  which  it  is  meaningless  and  within  which  it 
falls,  as  coming  to  us  as  much  by  interpretation  through 
concepts  as  through  the  senses.  The  experience  of  myself 
as  a  centre  takes  a  definite  expression  in  the  kind  of 
organism  in  which  knowledge  expresses  itself.  It  is  by 
so  much  finite,  and  is  itself  an  experience  that  varies  and 
grows.  For  it  is  clear  that  the  experience  of  myself  as  a 
finite  centre  is  never  either  complete  or  final.  What  is  of 
universal  truth  in  the  character  and  texture  of  such  a 
limited  experience  depends,  as  I  have  pointed  out,  on 
thoughts  which  are  identical  in  your  thinking  and  in  mine. 
But  we  have  also  sensations  and  feelings,  and  these,  if  they 
could  be  taken  merely  as  such,  would  be  ours  individually 
and  exclusively,  for  they  come  into  consciousness  only 
through  our  organisms.  What  is  accessible  to  others  is 
only  that  setting  in  reflection  of  particulars  which  is  in- 
separable from  the  reality  of  these  sensations  and  feelings 


196  APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY 

as  facts.  In  other  words,  it  is  just  in  virtue  of  the  universals 
of  knowledge  which  go  to  their  constitution  that  the 
experiences  of  different  persons  are  identical,  and  that 
these  persons  can  be  even  said  to  have  the  same  sensations 
and  feelings.  The  sensations  and  feelings  are  theirs 
exclusively  and  individually.  But  it  is  in  virtue  of  these 
universals,  identical  in  mind  in  every  form,  being  inherent 
in  particulars  which  are  in  what  is  actual  inseparable  from 
them  excepting  in  so  far  as  in  reflection  abstractions  are 
made,  that  we  see  the  same  sun,  moon,  and  stars  before  us. 
Pure  knowledge  through  concepts  and  mere  feelings  are 
neither  of  them  separate  entities.  The  notions  of  them  as 
self-subsisting  are  no  more  than  asymptotic  limits  towards 
which  the  activity  in  which  mind  consists  can  direct  itself 
indefinitely  in  abstractive  analysis.  But  that  activity  can 
never  finally  fix  them  as  entities,  for,  like  the  infinitesimal 
of  the  mathematician,  they  have  no  independent  actuality. 
Experience  is  an  entirety  within  which  they  are  distinguished 
only  when  it  is  turned  in  on  itself  and  is  analysed  by 
reflection  within  its  own  field. 

Now  the  reasons  why  we  speak  of  our  sensations  and 
feelings  as  though  we  could  visualise  them  as  self-sub- 
sistent,  or  seize  on  and  hold  them  up  as  existences  by 
themselves  and  with  a  character  all  their  own,  is  that  we 
concentrate  in  our  practice  on  images  of  our  own  existence 
as  being  that  of  a  physical  organism.  This  is,  however,  a 
concentration  which  results  in  truth  that  is  only  partial. 
We  always  refer  to  an  "  I  "  in  our  experience,  and  therefore 
to  a  subject  not  less  than  to  an  object,  and  subject  and 
object  are  neither  properly  separable  nor  mutually  exclu- 
sive facts.  The  subject  is  the  expression  of  experience 
in  its  quality  of  being  foundational,  as  it  is  in  the  judgments 
we  make  and  refer  back  to  the  self  which  judges.  Our 
experience  regarded  on  its  subject  side,  as  the  experience 
of  self,  is  approached  through  the  instrumentality  of 
conceptions  which  are  appropriate  only  to  a  stage  in  reflec- 
tion different  from  that  at  which  the  object- world  is 
treated  as  self-subsisting.  We  can,  and  in  daily  life  for 
many  purposes  do,  think  of  the  self  as  a  thing,  a  body 
clothed  with  an  infinity  of  properties  and  relationships,  in 
fine  as  if  it  were  a  substance  in  space  and  time  resembling 
other  substances.  But  it  is  not  the  less,  when  we  follow 
out  more  fully  what  its  nature  implies,  subject  as  much 


FINITE    PERSONALITY  197 

as  it  is  object,  and  the  more  we  abstract  from  the  charac- 
teristics with  which  its  objective  form  invests  it,  the  more 
nearly  does  it  present  itself  for  reflection  as  a  centre,  not 
itself  situated  somewhere  in  space  and  time,  but  to  which 
space  and  time  are  referred  ;  as  the  "  here  "  and  "  now  " 
in  distinction  from  the  "  there  "  and  "  then."  But  these 
expressions  stand,  not  for  points  in  an  absolute  framework 
of  space  and  time,  but  for  universals  with  the  identity  of 
conception  that  characterises  universals  whoever  may 
express  them.  The  characteristic  of  the  centre  is  therefore 
a  reference  back  to  thought,  and  this  takes  us  straight  to 
the  focal  point  in  knowledge,  that  activity  of  the  self  about 
which  we  have  already  spoken.  What  is  the  inference  ? 
It  is  surely  that  the  finiteness  of  the  centre  of  personality 
belongs  to  the  stage  in  its  reality  which  it  presents  when 
apprehended  in  a  less  notional  form,  the  apprehension 
which  tends  to  lay  its  stress  on  sensation  and  feeling  as  if 
these  were  the  dominant  and  only  true  moments  in  the  real, 
and  less  on  self -searching  processes  of  thought  of  a  more 
general  kind.  Sensation  and  feeling  are  represented  as 
energies  of  the  organism  in  the  orders  of  knowledge  to 
which  they  belong,  and  it  is  only  in  so  far  as  the  organism 
is  envisaged  as  in  an  object-world  that  they  have  any  place 
of  their  own  in  its  system.  Now  it  is  true  that  even  at  the 
level  of  personality  we  still  have  before  our  minds  the 
organism.  Personality  is  the  organism  at  a  higher  level 
in  conception,  just  as  what  lives  is  matter  and  energy 
transformed  and  exhibited  at  a  higher  stage  of  reality  as 
actually  experienced,  in  which  it  expresses  the  end  as  the 
final  cause  of  life.  The  principle  of  degrees  in  reality  as 
well  as  in  knowledge  is  the  explanation  of  how  this  is 
possible,  and  the  facts  appear  to  bear  out  the  explanation. 
But  the  organism,  even  when  disentangled  from  the 
abstract  character  with  which  it  is  invested,  and  when  in 
reflection  raised  to  a  higher  nature,  is  still,  as  the  level  of 
personality  is  reached,  at  no  abiding  stage  in  reflection. 
For  an  ideal  presses  its  claim  upon  our  thinking  with  a 
power  that  is  irresistible.  The  conception  of  subject, 
if  followed  out,  becomes  more  than  a  mere  point  or  focus 
of  reference  for  activities  or  events  in  space  and  time. 
Space  and  time  are  for  it ;  they  require  the  implication  of  a 
subject  reflecting  for  which  they  are  conceived  as  its  own 
facts  before  we  can  attach  meaning  to  the  words.  Even  the 


198  APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY 

physical  doctrine  of  Einstein  suggests  this.  Their  charac- 
ters are  relative  to  the  subject,  and  the  subject  as 
such  is  not,  when  adequately  interpreted,  in  them.  It  is 
only  when  reflection  has  by  an  imperfect  abstraction  lowered 
its  level,  and  has  treated  the  subject-self  as  having  a  par- 
ticular location  in  space  and  time  in  which  it  is  permanently 
at  rest  in  them,  that  they  claim  independence.  Indeed, 
it  is  only  in  so  far  as  reflection  remains  at  the  standpoint 
at  which  it  treats  the  subject  as  an  object  which  can  be, 
as  it  were,  held  out  and  scrutinised,  that  the  separation 
between  the  two  is  hypos tatised.  If  our  intelligence  were 
so  powerful  that  it  could  follow  as  far  as  the  implications 
lead,  it  could  do  more  than  reach  this  final  conclusion  as 
an  ideal  of  reflection,  attained  only  by  letting  the  activity 
of  thought  disentangle  itself  from  embodiment  in  sensation 
and  feeling,  and  in  the  symbols  that  are  descriptive  of  them, 
which  is  our  everyday  plane  in  human  experience.  Instead 
of  having  to  make  abstractions  and  look  towards  an  ideal 
merely  grasped  in  its  general  terms,  with  a  yearning  for 
closer  knowledge  more  akin  to  that  of  everyday  practice, 
the  mind  would  realise  the  impulse  to  seek  to  behold  God, 
as  it  is  wont,  in  accordance  with  the  physical  conditions  of 
knowledge,  to  seek  to  behold  man.  But  for  us,  at  the  level 
to  which  our  organic  conditions  confine  us,  this  cannot  be, 
save  through  the  abstract  might  of  thought.  If  we  would 
see  God  we  must  be  capable  of  ceasing  to  be  as  merely  men. 
There  is  for  reflection  a  barrier  fixed  between  the  ideal  and 
its  attainment  at  the  stage  in  the  whole  to  which  we  are 
compelled  by  the  finite  purposes  that  in  fact  chain  us  to 
our  station,  and  determine  for  us  a  "  This  "  from  which 
we  cannot  as  mortal  shake  ourselves  free,  or  do  more  than 
work  out  in  thought  the  implication  of  its  "  What."  Yet 
in  images  created  by  faith  we  do  pass  over  this  barrier,  for 
what  mind  has  itself  posited  mind  is  conscious  that  it  has 
in  a  sense  transcended.  Nor  is  this  faith  a  mere  blind 
striving.  It  is  rather  the  thinking  which,  abstract  though 
it  seems  even  for  metaphysics,  yet  dominates  and  trans- 
forms emotion  by  making  it  the  symbol  of  thought  and  the 
vehicle  of  ideals  that  are  concrete  and  of  compelling  power, 
as  in  art  and  in  religion.  Such  faith  is  indeed  the  sub- 
stance of  thing  unseen. 

But  if  this  be  the  true  nature  of  experience  it  must  be 
interpreted  with  a  new  significance.    It  must  be  thought  of 


DEGREES    OF    KNOWLEDGE    AND    REALITY    199 

as  being  something  both  wider  and  deeper  than  it  appears 
at  the  level  to  which  our  organic  structure  as  living  beings 
tends  to  hold  us.  Because  I  individually  am  dependent 
on  a  brain  and  senses  I  cannot  in  direct  apprehension  get 
beyond  the  degree  of  reality  which  is  for  me  a  fact  of  exist- 
ence, the  "  That  "  of  which,  though  partaker  of  the  true 
character  of  mind,  I  can  do  no  more  than  explicate  the 
"  What."  It  is  this  that  is  meant  when  it  is  conceded  that 
finite  mind  arises  through  nature  and  implies  its  presence, 
arises  and  implies  it  as  reality  at  a  higher  degree  arises 
through  and  implies  degrees  that,  while  lower  and  super- 
seded, are  still  actual  and  present.  It  is  no  question  of 
causation  in  time  of  the  higher  by  the  lower.  It  is  rather 
a  question  of  "  Becoming  "  in  the  sense  in  which  Aristotle 
understood  it,  the  becoming  that  is  the  activity  of  self- 
developing  mind,  completing  itself  through  a  succession  of 
stages.  In  these,  time,  though  a  relation  to  the  actual  in 
these  stages,  is  included  by  mind  within  the  whole  which 
its  activity  presents  to  itself  at  various  degrees,  instead 
of  itself  enveloping  the  mind  that  in  relation  to  it  is  rather 
the  subject  for  which  time  is.  If  this  be  true,  universal 
and  particular,  thought  and  feeling,  mind  as  distinguished 
from  nature,  are  phases  in  a  whole  which  in  its  self-com- 
pletion is  beyond  the  order  of  time,  and  is  spiritual  in  its 
inmost  character.  Experience  does  not  present  itself 
consistently  to  us  as  such  a  whole  because,  although  mind, 
we  are  mind  which  is  yet  conditioned  in  its  activity  by 
nature,  and  by  the  bodily  organism  which  is  part  of  nature. 
It  is  again  a  question  throughout  of  degree  in  knowledge 
and  reality.  I  am  human  because  I  habitually  follow 
human  purposes,  as  must  be  the  case  for  one  subject  to 
physical  conditions.  It  is  just  so  that  I  exist  at  my  stage 
in  the  hierarchy  of  existence.  These  purposes  are  mine 
inasmuch  as  without  them  I  could  not  be  what  I  individually 
am,  and  they  hold  me  to  dependence  on  sensation  and 
feeling.  But  even  as  human  I  am  mind  that  has  attained 
to  much  more  in  the  process  of  its  self-explication.  For 
mind,  in  whatever  form  it  appears,  has  for  its  very  essence 
and  characteristic  this,  that  it  is  free  and  capable  of 
abstracting  itself  from  every  particular  detail  in  its  object- 
world,  even  from  its  own  pain  and  its  own  death,  and  can 
grasp  its  own  character  as  having  standpoints  from  which 
it  delivers  itself  from  these. 


200  APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY 

I  have  now  tried  to  indicate  what  is  meant  by  speaking 
of  experience  as  foundational.  It  is  the  whole  outside  of 
which  I  do  not  get  and  cannot  get.  For,  raised  in  reflec- 
tion to  its  highest  form,  all  that  is  has  significance  only  as 
falling  within  it.  As  of  such  a  form  we  can  present  to  our- 
selves no  pictorial  image  of  it,  and  yet  our  reflection,  which 
is  activity  within  experience  itself,  compels  us  beyond  our 
present  images  of  its  contents.  The  completed  entirety 
within  which  falls  all  that  is  and  was  and  will  be,  not  less 
than  the  mind  for  which  it  is  there,  is  the  whole  for  thought 
short  of  which  thinking  cannot  arrest  its  conception. 
Experience  though  conditioned  is  knowledge.  We  must 
therefore  abstain  from  trying  to  treat  what  lies  at  the 
very  root  of  the  meaning  of  existence  as  though  it  were 
itself  an  incident  of  existence.  Knowledge  is  no  property 
of  a  substance  ;  it  cannot  be  called  a  property  even  of  the 
subject.  It  is  the  subject  itself  in  its  essential  aspect. 
In  fine  it  is  foundational,  the  foundation  on  which  the 
finite  centre  rests.  It  is  ever  building  up,  through  its  own 
self-distinctions,  the  whole  in  which  feeling  and  the 
reflection  of  finite  mind  are  separated,  but  by  a  process  of 
abstraction  which  is  justified  only  by  the  end  that  it  has 
to  subserve,  and  that  has  called  it  into  being. 

It  follows  from  these  conclusions  that  the  world  is  there 
independently  of  thought  which  is  recognised  as  merely 
my  thought,  thought  as  discussed  in  the  ordinary  text- 
books of  logic.  What  I  feel  and  see  and  hear  and  smell  and 
taste  is  actual  independently  of  the  relation  to  it  of  myself 
appearing  as  a  thing  in  the  world  confronting  it.  This 
is  realism  of  a  kind,  but  it  is  a  realism  which  finds  the 
universals  of  thought  as  themselves  present  in  the  con- 
stitution of  that  world.  For  it  imports  a  whole  which  is 
presented  as  embracing  common  qualities,  and  common 
qualities,  as  Aristotle  reminded  us  long  ago,  cannot  come 
to  us  through  the  particular  senses  of  individuals.  They 
are  universals  ;  not  entities  apart,  such  as  Scholasticism 
disputed  over  as  being  either  real  or  else  only  nominal. 
They  are  universals  that  are  inherently  present  in  the 
constitution  of  what  is  singular,  in  virtue  of  its  having  both 
general  and  particular  factors  or  moments. 

It  will  be  convenient  to  contrast  this  view  of  the  Universe 
with  others  that  are  current.  And  that  I  may  do  this  I 
must,  even  at  the  risk  of  repetition  in  different  language  of 


LOGIC    IN    DIFFERENT    FORMS  201 

some  things  that  have  already  been  said,  look  again  over 
certain  parts  of  the  ground  from  a  different  point  of  view. 
I  have  just  referred  to  the  treatment  of  thought  in  the 
ordinary  books  on  Logic.  But  these  books  are  written 
from  highly  varying  outlooks  on  the  subject.  There 
are  the  old-fashioned  manuals  of  formal  logic,  founded 
largely  on  that  phase  of  Aristotle's  teaching  which  is 
recorded  in  his  Analytics,  as  distinguished  from  very 
different  phases  that  appear  in  his  metaphysic  and  in  his 
treatise  on  the  mind.  In  his  teaching  of  logic  he  seems 
to  look  on  thinking  merely  as  an  instrument  in  our  hands. 
Then  there  are  expositions,  such  as  those  of  Mr.  Bradley 
and  Professor  Bosanquet,  in  which  thought  is  looked  on  as 
belonging  to  a  higher  order,  but  is  still  investigated  in  its 
appearance  as  the  thinking  of  a  finite  human  being,  con- 
ditioned by  his  position  in  nature.  Finally,  and  different 
from  both  of  these  modes  of  treatment,  is  that  of  logic  as 
belonging  to  the  metaphysic  of  ultimate  reality,  a  treat- 
ment in  which  thought  is  approached  as  being  a  system  of 
abstractions,  but  abstractions  not  only  from  what  is  finite, 
but  also  from  the  entirety  of  reality,  an  entirety  which 
implies  a  corresponding  system  of  counter-abstractions 
of  a  wholly  different  character.  This  is  the  method  of 
Hegel,  to  the  nature  of  which  we  shall  have  to  look  at 
a  later  stage.  Each  mode  of  approach  is  required  and  is 
legitimate  if  its  purpose  is  borne  in  mind.  The  varying 
modes  of  approach  are  each  of  them  necessary,  but  they 
belong  to  different  stages  in  reflection. 

We  start  in  our  development  as  human  beings  from  the 
simplest  phases  of  our  finite  life.  Our  world  begins  in 
sentience.  We  first  of  all  distinguish  our  sensations.  These 
present  themselves  as  we  distinguish  them,  in  relations  of 
time  and  space.  It  is  only  by  abstraction  from  the  con- 
tents which  they  qualify  that  we  come  to  isolate  these 
relations  and  regard  them  as  self-subsisting  frameworks. 
They  are  as  they  come  to  appear  only  for  reflection  which 
has  advanced  a  certain  way  in  pursuance  of  an  object. 
Within  them  we  first  conceive  the  feelings  we  have  as  to 
some  extent  exclusive  of  each  other.  We  then  begin  to 
realise  that  they  affect  each  other  in  fashions  which  we 
conceive,  in  terms  of  time  and  space  relations,  as  those  of 
causes  or  coexistences.  We  assume  that  the  laws  we  find 
to  be  followed  will  hold  true  as  our  experience  progresses, 


202  APPEARANCE   AND   REALITY 

and  the  assumption  is  verified  as  we  proceed  from  sentience 
to  sentience.  We  assume  this  because  the  basis  of  reality 
for  us  is  progressively  disclosed  as  inseparable  from  know- 
ledge and  its  rationality.  It  is  there  independently  of  our 
knowledge  as  finite  centres.  We  then,  by  reflection  based 
on  the  hypothesis  that  these  rational  laws  will  continue  to 
hold  good,  begin  to  predict  what  we  shall  find  as  we  pro- 
ceed to  fresh  experiences.  We  thus  enlarge  the  meaning 
of  the  world  that  we  are  progressively  finding  before  us. 
We  unconsciously  assume  that  what  we  first  of  all  have 
before  our  minds,  the  reign  of  the  mechanical  forms  of  law 
in  nature,  is  the  important  thing  to  look  for.  The  view  of 
the  world  which  we  thus  get  is  in  the  first  instance  that  of 
things  excluding  and  determining  each  other  in  their 
externality.  But  it  is  only  the  activity  of  reflection  that 
has  taken  us  beyond  our  immediate  sensations,  and  such 
reflection  has  at  first  been  directed  under  mechanical  con- 
ceptions in  order  to  subserve  practical  purposes.  As  we  go 
further  we  employ  other  ideas,  such  as  those  of  ends,  which 
guide  us  to  other  facts  and  relations  when  we  proceed  to 
reflection  and  prediction.  We  thus  come  to  find  the  world 
as  presenting  aspects  different  from  those  that  are  merely 
mechanical.  But  we  habitually  return  to  our  earliest 
tendency,  for  it  is  the  one  under  which  we  first  became 
accustomed  to  clarity  in  distinguishing.  Still,  even  this 
took  place  only  through  the  instrumentality  of  something 
more  than  mere  sensation.  It  was  the  work  of  thought, 
thought  that  found  its  justification  as  it  proceeded.  We 
therefore  go  forward  in  the  effort  to  range  the  contents  of 
our  experience  under  the  conceptions  to  which  we  were 
first  accustomed,  returning  to  categories  which  we  found 
to  be  true  of  the  order  of  things,  as  well  as  reliable  for 
predicting  the  forms  they  were  assuming.  It  was  indeed 
the  tendency  of  thought,  setting  before  itself  in  the  first 
instances  only  limited  purposes,  to  eliminate  other  con- 
ceptions of  ends  and  higher  causes  as  these  intruded  them- 
selves. Memory,  recognition,  comparison  of  ideas,  were 
all  operative,  but  operative  under  this  tendency  so  to 
represent  the  world  as  mechanistic  and  exclude  these  higher 
aspects.  They  were  higher  by  the  very  fact  that  in  the 
relation  of  the  end  to  the  means,  which  nature  displayed 
as  freely  as  it  did  that  of  mechanism,  and  in  the  relation  of 
the  whole  to  the  parts  as  exhibited  in  what  we  recognise 


THE    GROWTH    OF    OUR    KNOWLEDGE      203 

as  living,  the  mind  was  discovering  as  before  it  something 
more  akin  to  its  own  nature  than  this  mere  externality 
and  mutual  exclusion  of  the  constituent  elements  on  which 
in  the  first  stage  we  laid  stress.  This  is  the  outcome  of  the 
operation  of  the  final  end  that  is  implicit  in  knowledge. 
It  was  useful  to  treat  the  world  as  mechanical  and  self- 
subsistent.  But  it  soon  began  to  be  doubtful  whether 
even  in  practice  we  could  treat  the  mind  as  one  thing  and 
its  object  as  another  external  to  it.  For  mind,  as  it  more 
and  more  succeeded  in  reaching  over  its  world  and  making 
it  fully  intelligible,  was  more  and  more  finding  itself ;  and 
the  beautiful,  the  good,  and  the  true  came  to  be  looked  on 
as  inseparable  from  the  intelligence  for  which  they  were 
present.  It  was  in  this  way  that  experience  seemed  to 
develop  its  fulness.  Starting  from  mere  sentience  it  became 
progressively  the  experience  of  a  world  containing  various 
degrees  in  conception  and  various  stages  in  reality.  The 
higher  the  level  reached  by  reflection  the  higher  and  fuller 
is  this  experience,  and  the  more  it  becomes  plain  that  it  is 
only  by  our  abstraction  that  we  have  drawn  a  line  between 
experience  and  experiencing.  The  earliest  form  which 
the  process  of  growth  in  knowledge  assumes  is  that  of 
separation  in  space  and  time,  but  by  the  embodiment  of 
the  activity  of  the  mind  in  the  general  conceptions  which 
it  forms  for  itself  the  mind  is  able  to  get  beyond  what  is 
immediate,  and  mediately,  by  reflection,  to  grasp  the  past 
and  the  future  as  implied  by  the  real  not  less  than  is  the 
present.  But  as  sentience  is  of  what  is  present  it  is  only 
through  the  concepts  of  reflection  that  the  mind  can  accom- 
plish this  work.  Still,  its  activity  through  these  concepts 
has  no  limit.  They  belong  to  the  mind  and  they  create 
the  problems  which  they  resolve.  Their  justification  is 
that  they  seem,  as  Aristotle  held,  to  be  inseparable  from 
the  particulars  of  sense.  For  these  particulars  have  no 
meaning  apart  from  their  setting  in  general  conceptions. 
What  is  experienced  is  always  in  form  individual  or  singular, 
and  such  that  in  it  the  universal  element,  that  which 
thought  grasps,  is  inseparable  from  the  merely  particular, 
in  integrity  with  which  it  has  reality.  Experience  is  there- 
fore more  than  immediacy,  and  it  is  only  real  in  so  far  as 
the  activity  of  mind  finds  itself  disclosed  in  it.  It  is  not 
static.  It  is  an  activity,  a  constant  progress.  It  is 
dynamic  and  it  seems  to  progress,  in  an  effort  under  the 


204  APPEARANCE   AND   REALITY 

impulse  of  larger  ends  to  be  attained,  towards  the  realisa- 
tion of  that  completeness  which  mind  would  have  if  its 
world  were  not  estranged  from  it  by  the  distinctions  it  has 
itself  created. 

We  find  ourselves  as  actual  at  a  certain  stage  in  the 
process,  a  stage  which  is  our  "  That,"  our  point  of  depar- 
ture. Mind  and  body  are  not  two  distinct  things.  Our 
bodies  express  our  minds  as  their  own  "  entelechies."  But 
they  express  mind  as  subject  to  the  physical  limitations  of 
the  organism,  which  is  physical  not  less  than  it  is  alive 
and  sentient  and  intelligent.  Our  position  in  the  Universe 
is  therefore  subordinate  and  restricted.  It  is  because  we 
are  subject  as  well  as  substance,  because  we  bring  the 
Universe  into  the  focus  of  the  self,  and  because  there  is 
no  gulf  between  the  self  and  that  Universe,  that  we  can 
transcend  the  boundaries  of  the  space  and  time  that  hem 
in  our  immediate  perception.  But  it  is  only  through  con- 
ception, through  indirect  processes  of  thought,  which  can 
make  abstractions  and  so  bring  to  consciousness  that  which 
in  reality  is  of  the  character  of  the  universal,  that  we  get 
beyond  ourselves  and  take  in  the  Universe  in  its  entirety. 
Even  the  power  of  thinking  is  conditioned  by  the  strength 
and  health  of  the  organism  through  which  it  functions. 
The  state  of  the  nervous  system  may  make  all  the  difference 
to  the  appearance  to  us  of  the  world,  and  to  our  power  of 
interpreting  it.  A  paralytic  stroke  may  destroy  our 
capacity  as  men,  and  reduce  us  as  living  beings  to  the 
mental  level  of  the  unintelligent  brute  ;  to  partial  death. 
Beings  of  a  different  organisation  and  with  different  senses 
from  ours  might  have  a  wholly  different  experience.  Yet 
in  the  main  the  higher  and  most  perfect  characteristics  of 
thinking  would  have  to  be  for  them  what  they  are  for  us. 
Otherwise  the  existence  of  such  minds  could  have  no 
meaning  for  us,  or  of  ours  for  them.  We  cannot  even 
speak  of  them  as  possible,  unless  there  is  taken  to  be  in 
them  that  which  we  recognise  as  identical  with  certain 
aspects  of  our  own  existence  and  the  degrees  of  reality 
which  belong  to  these  aspects.  It  is  therefore  obvious 
that,  in  contemplating  the  possibility  of  any  phase  of 
experience,  we  think  of  a  common  basis  on  which  all 
possible  experience  must  rest,  a  common  medium,  if  a 
dubious  metaphor  be  permissible,  within  which  all  reality, 
the  merely  conceivable  as  well  as  the  actual,  must  fall. 


MIND    AS    SUCH  '205 

To  say  this  is  to  speak  of  what  is  true  of  mind  alone.  For 
mind  alone  has  quality  such  that  its  entire  Universe  has 
meaning  only  as  falling  within  itself  and  so  constituting 
with  it  an  ideal  and  a  completed  whole,  an  end  which 
demands  full  realisation,  a  perfection  of  existence  with  no 
region  beyond  itself  even  for  thought.  Mind  so  conceived 
by  reflection  can  never  be  a  pictorial  object  of  perception. 
So  to  represent  it  would  be  to  limit  and  transform  its 
nature.  Nor  can  mind  at  such  a  stage  in  self-realisation 
be  merely  a  centre  of  feeling.  For  feeling,  apart  from 
its  setting  in  knowledge  about  it,  is  an  abstraction,  and 
the  nature  of  what  is  final  cannot  be  of  such  a  character. 
It  cannot  any  the  more  be  in  the  nature  of  mere  thought 
as  marked  off  from  or  contrasted  with  feeling.  Its  nature 
must  imply  the  mediation  which  characterises  the  highest 
process  of  intelligence.  For  all  its  processes  must  be 
referable  to  the  self-contained  entirety  that  is  attributed 
to  this,  the  highest  and  final  degree  of  reality.  Eye  cannot 
see  or  ear  hear  such,  and  were  it  not  for  that  infinity  of 
range  which  is  characteristic  of  the  thinking  even  of  finite 
human  beings,  we  could  not  present  to  our  minds  the 
abstract  concept  in  reflection  of  the  subject  as  know- 
ledge, whose  field  and  content  are  no  existence  foreign 
to  its  self. 

Reality  at  such  a  degree,  although  a  self-contained 
system,  realises  itself  at  its  levels  progressively,  if  what 
is  no  better  than  a  metaphor  may  for  a  moment  be 
used.  And,  assuming  the  view  of  reality  which  this  book 
seeks  to  express  to  be  right,  it  is  obvious  that  reality  does 
so,  crystallising,  as  it  were,  its  conceptual  self-evolution 
at  stages  which  are  those  of  finite  mind.  Experience 
always  has  implications  beyond  those  we  attend  to  in 
everyday  practice.  We  know  only  in  so  far  as  we  are  more 
than  we  take  ourselves  to  be.  In  art  and  religion,  as  well 
as  in  philosophy  itself,  we  become  aware  of  this.  How  can 
the  causal  standpoint  of  physical  science  enable  us  to 
estimate  the  quality  of  a  sonata  ?  The  higher  emotions 
of  mankind,  undivorceable  as  they  are  from  reflection,  and 
inseparable,  their  apparent  immediacy  notwithstanding, 
from  the  thinking  that  knows  no  limit  to  its  range,  at 
moments  disclose  what  lifts  them  above  the  ordinary  level 
of  emotion.  Religion,  poetry,  music,  and  pictorial  art 
bring  feeling  to  a  level  as  high  as  any  that  reason  can 
15 


206  APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY 

reach,  and  by  reason's  light  set  emotion  for  us  in  forms 
that  endure. 

We  seek  for  wholes  of  various  orders  in  the  forms  both 
of  objects  of  what  we  call  direct  experience  and  of  general 
knowledge,  not  less  than  in  the  mind  that  apprehends  them. 
These  wholes  are,  as  I  have  said,  individual,  in  nature  as 
well  as  in  thought,  and  they  are  wholes  into  which  enter 
principles  of  general  application,  even  in  cases  where  the 
object  has  not  the  form  of  mind  but  belongs  to  a  different 
stage  in  the  hierarchy  of  reality.  Such  objects  point 
beyond  themselves  towards  an  ideal.  That  is  what 
Tennyson  means  when  he  says  : 

"  Flower  in  the  crannied  wall, 
I  pluck  you  out  of  the  crannies, 
I  hold  you  there,  root  and  all,  in  my  hand, 
Little  flower — but  if  I  could  understand 
What  you  are,  root  and  all,  and  all  in  all, 
I  should  know  what  God  and  man  is." 

Goethe  expresses  himself  similarly  about  our  everyday 
life.  It  is  in  his  poem  "  Vermachtniss  "  : 

"  Vernunft  sei  uberall  zugegen, 
Wo  Leben  sich  des  Lebens  freut, 
Darin  ist  Vergangenheit  bestandig, 
Das  Kiinftige  voraus  lebendig, 
Der  Augenblick  ist  Ewigkeit." 

Things  present  different  aspects  of  reality  according  to  the 
varying  degrees  they  embody.  In  our  experience  of  them 
we  have  not  departed  from  actual  fact  merely  because 
there  come  occasions  when  they  appear  to  us,  as  Browning 
says  : 

"  Changed  not  in  kind  but  in  degree. 
The  instant  made  eternity." 

It  may  assist  in  the  discussion  of  an  elusive  topic  which 
I  have  sought,  at  the  risk  of  considerable  repetition  in 
different  words,  to  elucidate,  if  I  now  try  to  contrast  the 
conclusion  so  far  reached  with  the  views  of  writers  such  as 
Mr.  F.  H.  Bradley,  Professor  Bosanquet,  and  Professor 
Pringle-Pattison.  For  although  these  three  thinkers  have 
discussed  the  nature  of  the  finite  self  and  have  arrived  at 
opinions  from  some  of  which  I  do  not  feel  myself  very  far 
removed,  there  are  yet  points  of  difference,  not  only 


MR.    F.    H.    BRADLEY  207 

between  themselves  but  between  them  and  myself,  which 
seem  to  me  to  require  consideration. 

To  begin  with,  for  Mr.  Bradley  and  (though  of  this  I 
am  not  quite  so  sure)  for  Professor  Bosanquet  also,  the 
nature  of  thought  is  to  be  relational,  by  which  they  mean 
that  the  subject  in  judgment  is  always  beyond  the  content 
predicated  of  it,  and  is  never  exhaustible  by  predicates 
which  cannot  contain  the  whole  of  its  nature.  Thus  no 
fact  of  sensible  experience  and  no  feeling  can  be  adequately 
exhibited  in  a  system  of  thought-content.  Thought  estab- 
lishes relations  and  is  discursive,  and  if  it  ceases  to  be  this 
it  ceases  to  be  itself,  and  yet  if  it  remains  this  it  cannot 
present  what  is  immediate.  On  the  reality  and  immediacy 
of  sentience  they  lay  great  stress.  And  so  they  hold  that 
to  enable  thought  to  attain  to  complete  presentation  it 
must  cease  to  predicate,  it  must  get  beyond  mere  relations, 
it  must  reach  something  other  than  what  we  usually  mean 
when  in  everyday  practice  we  use  the  word  truth.  It 
desires  to  reach  a  whole  which  can  contain  every  aspect 
within  it,  but,  if  it  is  to  do  so,  all  that  distinguishes  it  from 
feeling  and  will  must  be  absorbed,  and  thought  must  there- 
fore have  changed  its  nature.  In  a  mode  of  apprehension 
which  is  to  be  identical  with  reality,  predicate  and  subject 
in  judgment  and  not  less  than  the  whole  relational  form, 
must  be  merged.  I  think  that  these  sentences,  so  far  as 
few  words  can  suffice,  summarise  the  position  on  the 
question  stated  in  Mr.  Bradley's  Appearance  and 
Reality. 

Now  the  first  thing  that  strikes  me  about  the  argument 
is  that  all  the  thinking  of  which  we  have  any  experience 
by  its  very  character  implies  mediation  and  a  process  of 
establishing  relations.  If  we  are  debarred  from  relying 
on  the  predication  which  is  the  inseparable  form  of  judg- 
ment as  it  is  for  us  we  therefore  cannot  think  in  any 
adequate  fashion,  and  consequently  we  cannot  investigate 
the  nature  of  the  real  at  all.  It  is  true  that  the  form  our 
thinking  assumes  is  dominated  by  varying  ends.  At  times 
and  very  frequently  our  purpose  is  simply  to  distinguish 
the  predicate  from  the  subject  and  make  definite  thereby 
what  has  been  added  to  knowledge.  We  isolate  the  thing 
of  which  we  speak,  so  that  it  may  be  shown  as  inde- 
pendent in  its  essential  nature  from  what  we  say  about 
it.  "  The  sun  has  set."  The  sun  is  the  subject  in  this 


208  APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY 

judgment.  Its  setting  is  a  separable  phase  which  is 
predicated  with  the  implication  that  it  represents  only  a 
transitory  state  of  the  sun's  appearance.  A  mere  feeling 
of  sunset  would  give  us  no  knowledge.  We  want  definite 
knowledge.  Consequently  thought  assumes  the  form  of 
what  is  sometimes  called  judgment  of  the  understanding, 
in  which  the  subject  and  the  predicate  are  held  asunder. 
But  reflection  always  discloses  that  such  judgments  are 
only  valuable  for  limited  use.  The  fuller  truth  lies  in  the 
more  extensive  reflection  which  shows  the  sunset  to  be 
merely  an  incomplete  phase  in  a  physical  system,  a  large 
whole  in  which  it  gets  a  new  significance.  To  regard  a 
judgment  as  a  self-contained  and  final  movement  of  mind 
is  to  hypostatise  an  abstraction.  For  judgment  appears  to 
be  rather  the  exhibition  in  thought  of  the  enrichment  of  the 
subject  by  its  being  brought  continuously  into  relation 
with  a  larger  whole,  in  which  subject  and  predicate  are 
aspects  in  one  entirety  which  is  their  further  truth.  With 
this  provisional  whole  reflection  does  not  stop.  It  goes 
on  to  predicate  of  the  so  enriched  subject  yet  more,  and 
extends  the  significance  of  the  original  whole.  That  is 
inherent  as  what  is  called  the  dialectical  quality  of  know- 
ledge. The  sunset  turns  out  to  be  due  to  the  rotation  of 
the  earth,  which  will  for  many  hours  obscure  the  sun  from 
the  place  where  I  am.  It  is  only  for  the  sake  of  distinct- 
ness of  conception  that  we  pause  over  the  fragmentary  and 
crystallised  judgments  of  understanding.  Under  these  we 
abstract  and  hypostatise,  as  we  do,  for  instance,  when  we 
regard  things  arithmetically  with  reference  only  to  their 
numbers  and  not  their  qualities. 

Mr.  Bradley,  of  course,  is  well  aware  of  this  tendency  of 
thought,  which  he  regards  as  an  inherent  defectiveness. 
But  he  is  not  content  to  put  it  down  to  the  influence  of 
contracted  purposes,  an  influence  which  thought  might 
shake  off  by  altering  these  purposes.  He  holds  that  for  the 
apprehension  of  true  reality,  as  distinguished  from  appear- 
ance, a  form  of  apprehension  is  required  other  than  the 
thinking  which  is  for  him  in  every  phase  inherently  con- 
ditioned by  a  relational  character.  The  form  required 
must  be  one  in  which  apprehension  is  immediate,  and  is  not 
mediated  by  reflection.  Subject  and  predicate,  sentience 
and  thought,  must  not  be  separated  in  it.  Nothing  short 
of  the  avoidance  of  this  will  enable  the  mind  to  attain  its 


CARDINAL    NEWMAN  209 

ideal  grasp  of  ultimate  reality  in  its  fulness.  Such  a  per- 
fection of  knowledge  is  for  Mr.  Bradley  not  incapable  of 
being  conceived.  It  is,  indeed,  suggested  by  knowledge  as 
we  find  it,  for  in  that  knowledge  we  have  experience  of 
ourselves  as  impelled  to  seek  to  overcome  defects,  and  to 
reach  a  result  in  which  knowledge  can  rest  just  because  in 
it  absolute  reality  is  felt  as  much  as  thought.  Such  know- 
ledge is  an  Other  for  which  human  knowledge  searches, 
yet  it  would  be,  if  attained,  akin  to  our  human  knowledge, 
though  differing  from  it  in  having  transcended  the 
unending  relational  form.  We  should  in  that  case  have 
an  experience  which,  it  is  true,  we  cannot  have  under 
existing  conditions.  We  cannot,  starting  from  ourselves 
as  finite  centres,  represent  a  perfect  experience  in  an 
image,  or  even  construe  it  reflectively  in  its  detail.  But  we 
infer  that  if  we  could  attain  to  such  a  stage  we  should  have 
reached  knowledge  of  a  kind  which  must  be  more  than 
feeling,  just  as  it  must  be  more  than  relational  thought, 
a  knowledge  in  which  idea  and  reality  would  come  together 
in  an  identity  "  not  too  poor  but  too  rich  for  division  of  its 
contents." 

What  troubles  me  in  this  is  a  difficulty  in  following  how 
the  author  of  Appearance  and  Reality  can  legitimately  get 
as  far  as  he  does,  or  indeed  escape  the  precipice  of  a  com- 
plete scepticism.  Another  feature  in  Mr.  Bradley 's  system 
is  that  in  which  he  lays  emphasis  on  a  principle  of  degrees 
with  which  I  am  in  whole-hearted  agreement.  But  I  find 
difficulty  in  reconciling  it  with  what  I  have  just  referred 
to.  The  problem  of  philosophy  is  there,  in  his  view 
apparently,  not  the  explanation  of  genetic  evolution  in 
time,  but  the  explanation  of  degrees  of  completeness  in 
thought  and  its  objects.  Now  it  is  only  by  the  instru- 
mentality of  thought  itself,  as  we  know  and  rely  on  it  in 
daily  life,  that  we  can  even  attempt  to  realise  this  principle. 
On  thought  we  are  absolutely  dependent.  It  is  only  in 
terms  of  thought  that  any  kind  of  reality  can  have  meaning, 
or  that  any  significance  can  be  attached  to  its  existence. 
Experience  itself  is  penetrated  through  and  through  with 
such  thought.  Behind  it  we  cannot  get.  There  is  a 
passage  in  Cardinal  Newman's  Grammar  of  Assent l  in  which 
that  acute  critic  puts  very  simply  the  root  difficulty 

1  Fourth  •dition,  p.  61. 


210  APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY 

which  confronts  those  who  would  cast  doubt  on  our  ex- 
perience : 

"  We  are  what  we  are,  and  we  use,  not  trust,  our  faculties. 
To  debate  about  trusting  them  in  a  case  like  this  is  parallel 
to  the  confusion  implied  in  wishing  I  had  a  choice  whether 
I  would  be  created  or  no,  or  speculating  what  I  should  be 
like  if  I  were  born  of  other  parents.  '  Proximus  sum 
egomet  mihi.'  Our  consciousness  of  self  is  prior  to  all 
questions  of  trust  or  assent.  We  act  according  to  our 
nature  by  means  of  ourselves,  when  we  remember  or  reason. 
We  are  as  little  able  to  accept  or  reject  our  mental  constitu- 
tion as  our  being." 

My  experience,  even  conditioned  as  it  is  by  my  position 
as  a  living  and  intelligent  being  in  a  world  in  space  and 
time,  and  by  the  physical  limitations  of  brain  and  sense 
with  which  I  was  born,  is  thus  my  foundation.  I  can,  it 
is  true,  get  beyond  my  limits  through  thought,  which  takes 
the  form  of  conception,  and  fashions  universals  which  carry 
me  far  beyond  immediacy.  But  in  the  actual  exercise  of 
my  activity  in  thinking,  as  distinguished  from  its  quality 
and  range,  I  am  subject  to  physical  restrictions  which 
nature  imposes.  Thought  is  trammelled,  yet  not  more 
than  trammelled,  by  the  demands  of  time  and  space.  For 
it  is  no  sequence  of  events  in  these  ;  it  is  for  thought  that 
even  they  are  there  and  possess  meaning.  In  the  natural 
execution  of  our  limited  purposes  thought,  therefore, 
assumes  a  relational  form,  but  this  is  a  form  which  does 
not  exhaust  its  nature. 

It  was  a  conviction  similar  to  that  of  Cardinal  Newman 
which  led  Hegel,  when  he  wrote  The  Phenomenology  of 
Mind,  to  protest  against  the  idea  of  treating  knowledge 
as  something  by  itself,  or  as  a  mere  instrument  which  the 
mind  could  hold  out  for  independent  examination  in  a 
stereotyped  aspect,  and  criticise  ab  extra.  Kant  had  tried 
to  do  this,  and  in  the  Phenomenology  Hegel  denounces 
the  attempt.  For  the  latter  the  only  thing  that  could 
exhibit  the  real  nature  of  thought  was  itself.  Its  criticism 
must  therefore  be  the  self-criticism  to  which  it  subjects 
itself  in  observing  the  correction  of  its  own  abstractions 
which  experience  discloses  when  we  let  it  tell  its  own  story, 
by  unfolding  to  us  in  our  observation  forms  or  stages 


PROFESSOR    BOSANQUET  211 

ranging  from  substance  to  subject.  For  him  thought 
assumed  the  relational  aspect  which  the  judgment  of  the 
understanding  aims  at,  but  only  as  an  aspect  transitional 
to  the  stage  at  which  it  comes  to  comprehend  itself  as 
embracing  all  relations  within  it  as  its  own  creation.  Know- 
ledge was  therefore,  for  Hegel  as  for  Aristotle,  foundational 
to  reality  itself,  and  not  a  particular  fact  embraced  within  it. 
For  if  it  is  taken  to  be  such  a  fact,  and  as  such  may  exhibit 
a  relational  character  which  precludes  it  from  even 
abstractly  reaching  what  is  final,  it  follows,  as  Mr.  Bradley 
holds,  that  the  ultimate  reality,  the  Absolute,  must  be 
another  kind  of  experience,  qualitatively  and  possibly  even 
numerically  differing  from  our  own,  and  standing  to  it  in  a 
relation  which  excludes  any  approach  or  participation  that 
can  be  made  intelligible.  The  self  we  experience  and  know 
is  for  such  a  doctrine  mere  appearance,  a  construction  of 
reflection  chained  to  the  finiteness  of  the  centre  to  which 
it  belongs.  Reality  is  Another,  and  is  unattainable  by  the 
very  knowledge  that  professes  to  deduce  its  existence. 
It  is  difficult  to  see  how  such  an  entity  apart  can  have  even 
the  significance  which  Mr.  Bradley  and  Professor  Bosan- 
quet  assign  to  it,  or  any  real  meaning  as  an  intelligible 
foundation  for  the  Universe.  Such  a  view  is  far  removed 
from  that  which  finds  in  actual  experience  degrees  towards 
a  fuller  and  completed  knowledge  of  the  same  nature,  and 
which  looks  on  the  ideal  for  which  it  seeks  as  immanent  in, 
and  not  as  apart  from,  the  experience  of  which  in  thought 
it  is  the  completion. 

In  the  second  series  of  his  admirable  Gifford  Lectures 
Professor  Bosanquet  seems  to  me  to  come  near  to  this 
latter  view,  and  my  only  difficulty  about  what  he  writes 
is  to  read  it  as  consistent  with  his  interpretation  of  thought 
as  inherently  defective.  The  finite  individual,  he  declares, 
is  more  than  merely  finite,  and  has  a  capacity  in  thinking 
which  goes  beyond  what  is  finite.  "  It  is  freely  admitted," 
he  says  in  the  second  lecture,  "  that  in  cognition  the  self  is 
universal.  It  goes  out  into  a  world  which  is  beyond  its 
own  given  being,  and  what  it  meets  there  it  holds  in 
common  with  other  selves,  and  in  holding  it  ceases  to  be  a 
self-contained  and  repellent  unit."  He  does  not  find  the 
distinctness  of  finite  centres  a  difficulty.  For  "  the  pure 
privacy  and  incommunicability  of  feeling  as  such  is  super- 
seded in  all  possible  degrees  by  the  self -transcendence  and 


212  APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY 

universality  of  the  contents  with  which  it  is  unified."  These 
contents  are  "  organs  of  self-transcendence."  "  Feeling," 
in  order  to  be  capable  of  utterance  in  determinate  form, 
"  must  take  an  objective  character.  It  must  cease  to  be 
a  blank  intensity,  it  must  gather  substance  from  ideas." 
And  in  so  doing  it  "  must  change  its  reference  to  self,  or 
modify  the  self  to  which  it  refers.  Different  persons  are 
organisations  of  content  which  a  difference  of  quality, 
generally,  though  not  strictly,  dependent  on  belonging  to 
different  bodies,  prevents  from  being  wholly  blended." 
"  We  do  not  experience  ourselves  as  we  really  are." 

Professor  Pringle-Pattison  has  given  a  full  exposition 
of  his  conclusions  about  God  and  the  finite  self  in  the 
Gifford  Lectures  to  which  he  has  given  the  title  of  The  Idea 
of  God.  It  is  a  book  the  acute  insight  of  which  is  matched 
by  an  admirable  literary  form.  For  him  finite  personality 
is  not  what  it  is  for  Mr.  Bradley  and  Mr.  Bosanquet,  a  mere 
construction  of  thought  based  on  sentience  in  a  finite  centre, 
but  a  self-sufficing  entity.  The  problem  of  how  such  an 
entity  is  related  to  the  Absolute  is  for  Professor  Pringle- 
Pattison  inscrutable  by  human  thought.  It  cannot  be  that 
of  substance  to  substance,  for  in  the  first  place  he  is  critical 
of  the  application  of  the  conception  of  substance  in  this 
connection,  and  in  the  second  place  God  is  not  for  him  to 
be  regarded  as  in  any  sense  whatever  finite.  Yet  he  holds 
that  it  is  of  the  essence  of  the  self  to  be  exclusive  of  other 
selves,  and,  although  he  admits  that  this  cannot  be  so  in 
the  relation  of  man  to  God  in  the  same  fashion  as  in  the 
relation  of  man  to  man,  yet  how  it  can  be  different  in  the 
case  of  God  is  one  of  the  things  which  he  declares  cannot  be 
explained  and  must  remain  a  mystery.  For  he  finds  each 
finite  self  to  be  unique,  an  "  apex  of  the  principle  of  indi- 
viduation  by  which  the  world  exists,"  a  "  separate  and 
exclusive  focalisation  "  of  the  Common  Universe.  The 
self  or  subject  "  is  not  to  be  conceived  as  an  entity,  over 
and  above  the  content,  or  as  a  point  of  existence  to  which 
the  content  is,  as  it  were,  attached,  or  even  as  an  eye  placed 
in  position  over  and  against  its  objects,  to  pass  them  in 
review.  The  unity  of  the  subject,  we  may  agree,  simply 
expresses  this  peculiar  organisation  or  systematisation  of 
the  content.  But  it  is  not  simply  the  unity  which  a 
systematic  whole  of  content  might  possess  as  an  object, 
or  for  the  spectator.  Its  content,  in  Professor  Bosanquet's 


PROFESSOR   PRINGLE-PATTISON  213 

phrase,  has  come  alive  ;  it  has  become  a  unity  for  itself, 
a  subject.  This  is,  in  very  general  terms,  what  we  mean 
by  a  finite  centre,  a  soul,  or,  in  its  highest  form,  a  self." 

Professor  Bosanquet,  in  passages  other  than  those  I  have 
quoted  earlier,  lays  stress  on  the  characteristics  of  the 
subject  as  such  in  the  self,  but  these  characteristics  are  for 
him  not  final.  Experience  has  a  larger  meaning  in  which 
they  are  transformed,  and  in  some  sort  exist  transformed 
in  the  Absolute.  The  first  form,  therefore,  does  not  repre- 
sent the  full  or  the  actual  reality.  It  appears  as  it  does 
because  of  the  operation  of  a  thinking  which  consists  in 
for  ever  establishing  relations  that  are  themselves  not  finally 
real,  and  the  self  is  a  construction  through  such  relations, 
and  as  such  is  adjectival. 

For  Professor  Pringle-Pattison  the  self  is  impervious,  not, 
it  may  be,  to  all  the  influences  of  the  Universe,  but  to  other 
selves,  "  impervious  in  a  fashion  of  which  the  impene- 
trability of  matter  is  a  faint  analogue.  In  other  words,  to 
suppose  a  coincidence  or  literal  identification  of  several 
selves,  as  the  doctrine  of  the  universal  self  demands,  is 
even  more  transparently  contradictory  than  that  two 
bodies  should  occupy  the  same  space." 

For  myself  I  cannot  think  that  either  of  these  views 
is  satisfactory.  They  have  this  in  common,  that  they 
both  question  the  competence  of  thought  to  solve  the 
problem  of  the  nature  of  the  finite  self  and  of  its  relation 
to  the  Absolute.  For  in  one  view  the  finite  individual 
is  a  construction  of  relational  thought,  which  by  reason 
of  its  inherent  incapacity  cannot  attain  to  the  path  by 
which  alone  reality  can  be  reached.  In  the  other  view 
the  metaphors  used  seem  to  me  merely  to  disguise  the 
suggestion  that  selves  are  in  truth  mutually  exclusive 
units  the  relations  of  which  can  be  truly  assigned  to 
positions  occupied  in  time  and  space.  They  are  thus 
in  effect  brought  under  the  category,  not  of  subject,  but 
of  substance,  however  different  be  the  name  which  is 
given  to  it.  The  self  so  regarded  is  of  a  nature  differing 
toto  ccclo  from  the  self  regarded  as  one  among  many  but 
explained  to  be  so  regarded  only  provisionally,  and 
because  reality  is  taken  at  a  certain  stage  or  degree  which 
is  short  of  that  which  belongs  to  it  when  more  fully 
comprehended.  Now  the  doctrine  of  degrees  seems  not 
only  to  get  rid  of  the  difficulties  arising  from  apparent 


214  APPEARANCE  AND  REALITY 

exclusiveness  which  impress  Professor  Pringle-Pattison, 
but  to  restore  thought  to  the  position  of  respectability 
from  which  Mr.  Bradley  and  Professor  Bosanquet  depose 
it.  Intelligence  is  not  the  less  intelligence  because  there 
are  aspects  under  which  it  presents  itself  to  itself  as  par- 
ticipating in  the  character  of  an  object  in  space  and  time, 
or  as  conditioned  in  the  way  we  find  it  described  as  being 
in  the  logic-books.  For  the  individual  man,  notwith- 
standing that  he  is  also  the  subject  in  knowledge,  cannot 
escape  from  the  fact  that  the  knowledge  is  his  knowledge, 
the  mental  activity  of  a  particular  individual,  whom  the 
psychologist,  by  applying  his  abstract  methods,  may 
regard  as  possessing  that  knowledge  as  a  property  or 
quality,  and  whom,  if  we  abstract  from  what  is  indeed  of 
the  essence  of  his  personality,  we  must  look  on  as  an 
organism  or  even  as  a  thing  with  attributes.  It  is  so 
that  the  category  of  substance  inevitably  introduces  itself. 
In  finite  knowledge,  that  is  to  say,  knowledge  the  activity 
of  which  is  conditioned  as  it  is  with  us,  this  will  always 
be  the  case.  For  our  basis  is  to  start  in  time  from  what 
we  directly  feel,  from  what  our  organism  brings  to  con- 
sciousness, and  the  process  of  our  knowledge  is  one  which 
develops  the  implications  of  what  thus  seems  to  come  to 
us  from  without  through  the  channels  of  our  senses.  But 
in  developing  these  implications  we  are  not  extracting 
externalities  out  of  externalities.  We  are  rather  bringing 
to  light  principles  which  are  implicit  as  foundational  to 
even  the  simplest  aspect  of  experience.  Among  these 
principles  is  the  presence  at  every  stage  of  the  subject 
moment  in  experience.  As  we  reach  the  higher  stages  the 
far-reaching  character  of  this  moment  and  its  unity  with 
its  object  become  more  and  more  apparent.  Experience 
is  a  single  and  self-contained  entirety,  although  it  has  thus 
many  aspects  and  degrees  towards  perfection.  And  it 
seems  to  me  to  have  in  no  phase  any  meaning  except  as 
mediated  by  thought  and  interpreted  by  the  only  form  of 
thought  I  know,  the  thought  which  is  progressive  and  can 
set  before  it  nothing  short  of  the  completed  whole  that  is 
the  ideal  towards  which  it  aspires.  That  whole  can  surely 
be  neither  unmediated  feeling  nor,  at  the  other  extreme, 
an  intellectual  totum  simul,  unchanging  and  inert.  It 
must  rather  be,  in  a  completed  if  ideal  form,  just  the 
activity  that  expresses  and  develops  itself  in  us,  in 


SUMMARY    OF    CONCLUSIONS  215 

varying  degrees  towards  perfection  in  the  experience  in 
which  we  who  are  its  members  and  creatures  participate. 
It  is  the  system  of  that  activity  which  is  the  interpreta- 
tion and  foundation  of  the  Universe,  that  in  which  being 
and  knowing  are  not  exclusive  or  apart.  Philosophy, 
Religion,  and  Art  alike  appear  to  guide  us  towards  this 
result. 

I  will  now  sum  up  its  conclusion  before  bringing  this 
chapter  to  its  end.  The  world  that  confronts  me  is 
actual,  and  is  independent  of  me,  its  observer.  But  that 
is  not  the  last  word  about  either  that  world  or  myself. 
Both  belong  to  a  greater  entirety.  It  is  only  in  so  far  as 
they  fall  within  the  field  of  knowledge  that  they  have 
any  meaning  or  are.  The  difficulty  which  realism  has  had 
in  admitting  this  has  arisen  from  its  assumption  that 
knowledge  is  the  property  and  instrument  of  a  finite  self, 
the  means  by  which  an  independent  knower  lays  hold  of 
what  is  actual  apart  from  himself.  But  this  assumption 
not  only  makes  the  knower  different  from  his  knowledge, 
but  implicitly  treats  the  knower  as  a  substance  of  which 
knowledge  is  an  activity  or  property.  The  knower  is 
thus  regarded  as  finite.  In  a  sense  this  is  true,  as  we 
have  already  seen,  but  only  when  we  are  concerned  with 
aspects  that  are  far  from  representing  the  whole  truth. 
Knowledge  cannot  really  be  an  instrument  wielded  ab  extra, 
because  it  is  that  within  which  all  reality,  whatever  be 
its  nature,  falls.  Moreover,  knowledge  cannot  itself  be 
expressed  in  terms  that  go  beyond  itself.  It  is  the 
foundation  of  all  reality,  of  the  percipient  mind,  whether 
nascent  or  fully  developed,  as  much  as  of  that  which  is 
perceived.  Because,  at  the  stage  at  which  we  exist  as 
individual  human  beings,  it  expresses  itself  in  the  form  of 
an  organism,  the  conscious  self  makes  itself  actual  in 
finite  form,  the  form  of  the  intelligent  self  with  a  physical 
aspect.  This  fact  is  its  "  That,"  from  which  we  start 
and  must  start,  and  our  task  does  not  go  beyond  the 
explanation  of  what  it  signifies.  One  thing  which  such 
explanation  brings  to  consciousness  is  that  knowledge 
has  different  orders,  and  is  always  relative  to  the  order 
in  conception  and  the  standards  with  which  it  is  con- 
cerned. The  limitations  imposed  on  the  activity  of  our 
minds  by  the  organic  conditions  under  which  they  think 
prevent  us  from  being  at  all  times  and  under  all  circum- 


210  APPEARANCE  AND   REALITY 

stances  aware  that  this  is  so,  or  that  in  the  form  of  our 
knowledge  as  so  conditioned,  which  we  call  oiir  experience, 
there  are  always  implicit  not  only  the  conceptions  of  a 
single  order  but  those  of  many  orders.  It  is  by  making 
use  of  a  single  kind  of  conception,  and  assuming  it  to  be 
exhaustive,  that  we  come  to  think  of  the  mind  as  one 
thing  and  its  object  as  another  thing,  with  knowledge  as 
a  property  by  which  the  first  can  reach  the  second.  But 
closer  attention  shows  that  mind  is  much  more  than  an 
individual  thing  and,  taken  apart  from  the  abstract  fashion 
in  which  we  are  apt  to  regard  it,  is  not  different  in  nature 
from  knowledge  itself.  Our  experience  is  thus  potentially 
and  implicitly  complete  knowledge.  It  is  our  human 
conditions  that  prevent  it  from  becoming  this  explicitly. 
Yet,  inasmuch  as  we  are  inherently  more  than  we  take 
ourselves  to  be,  no  ideal  short  of  perfection  in  knowledge 
can  ever  satisfy  us. 

Just  as  difference  of  order  in  thought  appears  in  the 
experience  of  the  finite  individual,  so  it  appears  as  differ- 
ence of  order  in  mode  of  existence  and  meaning  of  the 
object  that  confronts  him  in  space  and  time.  For  that 
object  too  falls  within  knowledge,  and  is  characterised  by 
the  various  levels  which  knowledge  reaches  in  it. 
Mechanism  and  life  and  intelligence  as  appearing  in  the 
object- world  are  all  equally  entitled  to  be  called  real.  It 
is  only  by  abstraction  from  the  fulness  of  our  experience 
that  we  set  them  up  in  our  descriptions  as  independent 
and  self-subsistent  entities.  For,  like  thought  itself, 
experience  is  always  dynamic  and  never  static.  The 
dialectic  of  its  activity  is  everywhere  apparent. 

That  we  should  be  aware  of  an  external  world  is  there- 
fore, contrary  to  what  is  commonly  supposed,  no  fact 
that  can  be  resolved  into  something  antecedent  to  itself 
in  logic  or  even  in  time.  The  actual  problem  is  to  bring 
out  the  implications  of  this  awareness  and  its  significance. 
Neither  Plato  nor  Aristotle  nor  Plotinus  was  troubled 
by  any  such  problem  as  subjective  idealism  raises,  any 
more  than  have  been  those  writers  of  modern  times  who 
have  denied  that  knowledge  is  a  mere  instrument.  They 
would  all  of  them  have  equally  refused  to  join  in  the 
attempts  of  Berkeley  and  Hume,  or  in  the  attempts  of 
the  New  Realists  of  to-day,  to  bring  awareness  under 
mechanistic  conceptions.  The  way  that  is  better  than 


THE    WORLD    AS    IT    SEEMS  217 

any  of  such  attempts  is  surely  to  refuse  to  depart  from 
belief  in  the  reality  of  the  world  as  it  seems  to  us,  or  to 
allow  ourselves  to  be  debauched  by  undue  indulgence  in 
the  metaphors  that  give  plausibility  to  such  attempts. 
The  world  is  there  as  it  seems,  and  it  presents  itself  to  us 
in  orders  of  knowledge  and  reality  all  of  which  are  in 
their  own  places  valid  and  actual.  That  is  why  it  is 
essential  that  we  should  understand  and  hold  firmly  to 
the  great  principle  of  relativity.  For  it  is  only  by  doing 
so  resolutely  that  we  can  hope  to  shake  off  the  effects  of 
the  metaphors  in  which  distorted  views  have  been  sug- 
gested to  us. 

The  further  problem  that  remains  if  we  have  succeeded 
in  this  is  to  make  clear  to  ourselves  what  the  foundational 
fact  of  knowledge  really  imports.  If  we  throw  aside  the 
physiological  and  psychological  metaphors  with  which 
it  is  commonly  sought  to  invest  that  fact,  it  remains  appar- 
ently plain  that  we  still  have  to  look  for  its  nature  in  our 
own  experience  changed  rather  in  degree  than  in  kind. 
But  then  degree  means  everything  when  we  are  concerned 
with  the  immanence  of  meaning  which  we  discover.  We 
are  not  indeed  driven  like  Plotinus  to  reject,  as  an  obstacle 
to  the  grasp  of  mind  in  its  highest  conceivable  form,  any 
possible  relation  to  an  object.  For  if  that  relation  falls 
completely  within  mind,  as  one  established  by  itself,  it 
is  no  more  than  a  distinction  which  in  being  established 
is  transcended.  We  may  be  content  with  Aristotle  to 
regard  mind  itself  as  activity,  as  in  all  its  forms  essen- 
tially Becoming,  and  its  ultimate  character  as  being 
that  of  thought  which  thinks  itself  and  finds  itself  in  its 
object.  The  conception  of  mind  at  such  a  level  seems 
to  be  forced  on  us  when  we  turn  reflection  in  upon  itself. 
The  significance  of  what  is  sometimes  called  divine 
immanence  is  the  recognition  that  the  orders  in  the 
knowledge  of  the  finite  self  are  explicable  only  as  partial 
expressions  of  higher  orders  which  reveal  themselves  to 
reflection,  and  in  which  the  distinction  between  thinking 
and  what  is  thought  is  in  the  end  and  ideally  superseded. 
It  is  only  through  such  a  conception  that  the  foundation 
of  the  Universe  appears  to  become  intelligible. 

In  the  final  result  the  character  of  what  we  perceive 
may  be  put  thus.  We  find  before  us  existents  which  seem 
independent  of  the  apprehension  of  the  observer,  but 


218  APPEARANCE  AND  REALITY 

which  resemble  in  character  the  thoughts  of  which  he  is 
aware  in  his  own  mind.  These  they  resemble  particularly 
in  that  they  are  always  breaking  out  into  relations,  and 
in  that  the  relations  which  they  so  disclose  are,  like  those 
of  the  thoughts  about  them,  intrinsic  to  these  entities, 
and  not  existences  independent  of  them.  If  I  say  that 
my  notion  of  something  is  that  it  is  this  particular  definite 
thing,  that  implies  that  it  is  distinguished  from  some 
other  thing  different  from  it.  Neither  thought  has  its 
meaning  or  its  reality  independently  of  the  other  thought. 
So  it  is  with  its  object  in  nature  also.  A  black  thing  is 
only  what  it  is  when  contrasted  with  white  things.  A 
change  is  only  a  change  relatively  to  what  does  not  change. 
A  single  thing  is  what  it  is  only  when  contrasted  with  a 
plurality  of  things.  The  more  we  consider  what  we 
apprehend  as  being  objects  in  any  experience  of  nature, 
the  more  we  see  that  they  are  what  they  appear  to  be 
just  in  distinction  from  objects  that  appear  differently. 
Relativity  is  everywhere  obvious.  It  is  inherent  in  the 
order  of  nature  just  as  much  as  it  is  inherent  in  the  order 
of  knowledge.  It  is  only  through  judgments  of  contrast 
that  the  distinctions  between  things  which  exist  in  nature 
have  any  significance  for  us.  The  "  root  "  from  which 
nature  springs  and  the  "  stuff "  out  of  which  it  arises  are 
thus  analogous  to  the  "  root  "  or  "  stuff  "  from  which 
our  thoughts  arise.  Both  possess  the  characteristics  that 
are  distinctive  of  mind.  If  there  be  no  problem  that  can 
be  rationally  raised  as  to  why  we  know,  what  we  are  left 
with  is  thus  nature  that  is  inherently  of  the  character  of 
mind.  Of  course  my  thoughts  do  not  make  the  things 
I  individually  see,  but,  on  the  other  hand,  the  character 
of  the  things  I  see,  when  I  apprehend  its  full  significance 
and  implications,  is  not  a  different  one  from  that  of  my 
thoughts.  It  is  only  under  my  abstractions  that  the  two 
seem  foreign  to  each  other,  abstractions  which  are  made 
for  various  purposes  in  the  progress  of  an  effort  towards 
a  more  exact  understanding  of  reality,  and  which,  in  the 
course  of  this  effort,  come  to  stand  for  degrees  of  unreality. 
The  doctrine  of  physical  relativity  is  just  a  special  case 
of  the  general  principle.  If  we  approach  nature  by  what 
aim  at  being  strictly  objective  methods  of  approach, 
such  as  that  of  Professor  Whitehead,  we  seem  to  come  to 
just  the  same  thing  in  the  end.  There  is  a  root  which 


PHYSICAL    RELATIVITY  219 

branches  into  reality  of  two  descriptions,  and  these  are  of 
characters  that  are  not  different,  and  in  which  mental  and 
non-mental  are  not  distinctive  terms.  That  is  why,  for 
instance,  space  and  time  are  found  to  imply  each  other, 
and  why  in  the  general  investigation  of  nature  what  we 
seek  to  arrive  at  is  always  meaning. 


CHAPTER   X 

MANIFOLD    ORDERS   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

IT  is  now  time  again  to  approach  the  principle  of  orders 
in  thought.  The  first  observation  I  wish  to  make  is  one 
by  way  of  reminder  that  conceptions  or  categories  of 
different  orders  may  operate  at  the  same  time  in  our 
experience.  A  man  may  be  thought  of  from  many  stand- 
points, the  selection  of  which  depends  on  the  aspect  of 
his  personality  our  purpose  is  concerned  with.  It  is  only 
when  we  take  our  conceptions  in  abstraction  from  the 
individual  form  in  which  alone  they  attain  reality,  a  form 
that  implies  particularity  not  less  than  the  universals  in 
which  it  is  set,  that  we  get  these  conceptions  as  apparently 
exclusive.  Their  logical  character  is  that  of  being  definite 
and  general,  and  they  are  so  far  exclusive.  But  we 
cannot  present  to  ourselves  these  pure  abstractions,  or 
even  think  about  them  in  isolation.  For  all  our  thinking 
implies  imagery,  an  image  that  coming  under  a  concept 
gives  actuality  for  us  to  that  concept,  but  does  not  lose  its 
character  as  an  image.  When  I  speak  of  a  circle  I  imagine 
a  circle-like  appearance.  There  is  no  such  thing  in  experi- 
ence as  a  perfect  circle,  nor  can  I  construct  a  mental 
picture  of  one.  But  I  can  fashion  in  my  mind  or  on  paper 
an  effigy  the  importance  of  which  for  me  in  the  connection 
in  which  I  interpret  it  is  only  that  it  is  a  sufficient  symbol 
of  a  conceptual  meaning  in  my  reflection. 

I  am  free  to  direct  my  attention  as  I  choose.  If  my 
purpose  is  logical  or  mathematical  reasoning  I  select  the 
point  of  view  that  is  proper  to  my  purpose,  and  apply 
the  general  conceptions  that  are  relevant  and  are  of  the 
order  that  is  appropriate.  That  is  how  I  come  to  identity 
and  correspondence.  What  determines  the  relevancy  and 
appropriateness  of  these  conceptions  is  of  course  not 
arbitrary  on  my  part.  I  am  actual  only  so  far  as  I  am, 
not  merely  subject  in  reflection,  but  just  as  much  an 

220 


MY    EXPERIENCE  221 

object  in  a  field  of  experience  within  which  it  is  conditioned 
by  its  surroundings.  Even  for  my  mind  its  individual 
freedom  is  limited  by  conditions.  They  extend,  not 
merely  to  what  is  spatial  and  temporal,  but  to  the  entire 
content  of  the  experience  within  which  I  reflect.  The 
further  I  get  from  presenting  myself  to  myself  under  the 
aspect  of  mere  substance,  and  the  nearer  I  come  to  the 
full  realisation  of  my  nature  as  subject  in  my  know- 
ledge, the  more  there  sinks  out  of  sight  the  view  of  myself 
as  an  individual  whose  thought  and  activity  belong  to  the 
contingency  of  events  and  whose  spontaneity  is  controlled 
from  without.  If  I  could  present  in  reflection  only  the 
view  of  myself  as  subject  it  seems  as  though  there  would 
be  no  significance  in  the  notion  of  a  plurality  of  minds, 
and  so  none  for  arbitrariness  in  thought  or  volition. 
These  imply  my  existence  within  a  world  of  objects.  But 
I  cannot  present  to  my  mind  such  a  view,  even  though 
the  ideal  to  which  it  points  me  may  be  true  and  the  possi- 
bility in  abstract  reflection  at  least  of  such  a  standpoint 
is  necessitated  as  that  from  which  alone  a  thoroughgoing 
explanation  from  above  is  possible.  For  I  am,  when  all 
has  been  said,  still  an  individual  sitting  in  a  chair,  and 
what  I  can  do  is  no  more  than  to  think  of  myself  as 
requiring  for  interpretation  of  my  full  significance  orders 
of  thought  which  include  the  lower  ones  distinctive  of 
such  physical  things  as  myself  and  my  chair.  All  actual 
experience  is  not  only  in  its  details  concrete,  but 
implies  a  multitude  of  conceptions  which  pertain  to  the 
different  levels  from  which  it  can  be  approached.  The 
individual  thing  before  my  eyes  has  many  aspects. 

When,  sitting  here,  I  look  out  of  the  window  I  see  how 
true  this  is.  The  earth  in  the  park  is  hastily  taken  to  be 
inorganic.  But  a  fuller  and  more  searching  experience 
tells  me  that  this  is  an  altogether  inadequate  account  of 
it.  For  the  earth,  in  the  first  place,  contains  a  multitude 
of  micro-organisms,  and  there  is  also  no  part  of  it  which 
does  not  owe  its  form  to  the  intervention  of  living  beings, 
whether  these  be  worms  or  gardeners.  Again,  even  the 
inorganic  has,  as  part  of  its  existence  for  me,  colour  and 
weight  and  shape,  and  these  are  appearances  which  vary 
with  the  particular  relation  to  the  percipient.  Every 
phase  of  apparently  inert  matter  is  relative  even  for  the 
individual  onlooker. 
16 


222         MANIFOLD   ORDERS   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

When  I  follow  this  out  it  becomes  fairly  plain  that  my 
hasty  view  of  what  I  call  inorganic  matter  was  an  abstract 
one,  and  quite  inadequate  to  the  riches  of  what  I  perceive. 
The  modern  electrical  theory  of  the  constitution  of  matter 
resolves  apparently  ultimate  particles  or  molecules,  and 
reduces  them  to  central  corps  of  positive  electricity  sur- 
rounded by  clusters  of  electrons,  composed  of  negative 
electricity  and  rotating  round  the  corps.  But  who  has 
ever  seen  or  felt  an  electron  in  isolation  ?  Matter  of  any 
particular  kind  is  really  in  the  nature  rather  of  an  event 
which  requires  time  for  functioning,  and  does  not  in  its 
scientific  description  present  us  with  the  last  word.  It  is 
by  inference,  as  the  result  it  may  be  of  "  a  welter  of 
differential  equations,"  that  we  get  at  the  notion  of  what 
is  to-day  talked  of  as  its  final  meaning  in  terms  of  a  mag- 
netic field.  We  certainly  do  not  experience  this  directly, 
although  we  read  about  it  in  books.  Its  scientific  char- 
acter is  an  inference  of  a  highly  abstract  though  very 
valuable  kind.  Physics  is  conducting  those  who  pursue 
it  further  and  further  into  the  notional  regions  of  mathe- 
matics. Even  the  new  branch  of  learning  known  as 
"  Physical  Chemistry  "  is  of  this  sort.  No  set  of  images 
is  any  longer  insisted  on  as  adequate  to  molecular  struc- 
ture in  chemistry  or  to  its  laws.  The  images  employed 
are  more  and  more  treated  as  merely  symbolic  of  more 
general  and  therefore  more  abstract  concepts.  It  is 
certainly  not  in  terms  of  such  remote  notions  that  the 
plain  man  interprets  what  he  fancies  he  sees  in  the  flower- 
beds, and  has  taken  to  be  inert  components  heaped 
together  mechanically.  In  nature  the  inorganic  is  an  idea, 
like  that  of  bare  space,  got  by  abstraction  from  a  greater 
fulness  of  reality,  and  is  a  useful  working  hypothesis  for 
limited  purposes,  but  not  adequately  or  accurately  repre- 
sentative of  all  the  phenomena  that  belong  to  the  actual. 
Its  real  significance  is  in  final  analysis  negative  ;  it  is  that 
of  an  environment  which  we  hastily  assume  to  be  outside 
and  independent  of  the  scope  of  the  activity  of  life. 

We  present  to  ourselves  pictorially  our  meanings  and 
the  interpretations  which  we  form  in  our  minds  about 
what  we  see  or  hear  or  feel  or  imagine.  What  we  think 
may  have  been  a  result  reached  only  indirectly  by  reflec- 
tion. It  may  be,  for  example,  the  reference  of  the 
phenomena  of  the  material  world  to  electrons  which  can 


PICTORIAL    THINKING  223 

be  described  only  in  highly  general  language.  But  even 
of  such  electrons  we  persist  in  forming  some  kind  of  image, 
unconsciously  but  assuredly.  Now  such  images  are  of 
course  misleading,  unless  it  is  always  borne  in  mind  that 
they  are  but  symbolical  of  what  is  general  in  concrete 
universals.  For  the  actual,  even  when  it  is  a  mere  mental 
picture,  always  has  in  its  nature  the  moment  of  the  par- 
ticular. Even  if  I  say  of  anything  just  that  it  is  here  or 
now  I  say  what  is  untrue,  for  by  the  time  I  have  spoken 
the  words  it  has  become  there  and  then.  The  descrip- 
tions are  in  terms  that  are  of  necessity  general,  and  they 
do  not  exclusively  govern  the  particulars.  They  are 
forms  in  apprehension  which  belong  to  reflection. 

Yet  they  are  essential  to  the  actual.  It  is  intelligible 
only  as  possessing  such  forms.  We  may  call  them  rela- 
tions. They  are,  however,  relations  which  enter  into  the 
events  we  observe  and  apart  from  which  these  events 
could  not  be  apprehended.  That  is  what  is  meant  by 
calling  them  intrinsic  or  internal.  But  no  event  can  be 
so  apprehended  except  as  in  a  duration,  a  merely  specious 
present,  which  imports  change.  When  we  try  to  fix  this 
in  an  image  in  order  to  preserve  its  permanent  or  universal 
aspect,  we  transform  it.  It  is  thus  that  images  which  are 
used  to  symbolise  the  universals  of  reflection,  or  the  rela- 
tions that  remain  identical  through  changes  in  what  is 
related,  are  apt  to  mislead.  They  do  not  adequately  repre- 
sent the  actual  in  our  experience.  Some  external  symbols 
are  indeed  so  ordered  that  they  do  not  profess  to  do  more 
than  symbolise.  The  name  "  square  "  does  not  mislead 
when  it  calls  up  the  image  of  a  square.  We  know  that 
what  is  important  is  only  to  be  found  in  the  definition 
which  the  name  connotes,  and  that  this  definition  is  of 
general  and  not  of  particular  application.  In  the  case  of 
a  number  also  we  are  not  misled,  unless  it  be  by  looking 
on  it  as  the  indication  of  a  stage  in  the  counting  of  par- 
ticulars, whereas  modern  mathematics  has  extended  the 
connotation  to  the  description  of  the  relations  to  each 
other  of  classes  or  collections.  But  with  most  names  it 
is  otherwise.  They  call  up  an  image,  and  the  image  is 
not  a  distinct  guide  to  the  reality. 

Thus  it  comes  about  that  the  process  of  naming  calls 
up  more  than  universals,  and  that  as  we  use  words  in  our 
trains  of  reasoning  we  think  pictorially.  But  as  such 


224         MANIFOLD   ORDERS   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

pictures,  which  naturally  stand  for  actual  and  individual 
objects  of  experience,  contain  in  their  constitution  orders 
of  thought  of  more  than  one  kind,  our  images  are  mis- 
leading in  a  more  subtle  fashion  than  that  just  alluded  to. 
For  they  suggest  as  applicable  orders  of  thought  other 
than  those  appropriate. 

It  is  tempting  to  express  oneself  in  images,  for  they 
lend  a  vividness  which  is  a  great  adjunct  to  style.  More- 
over, they  are  suggestive  of  feelings  which  cannot  be 
described  abstractly.  In  art  they  are  therefore  essential. 
For  in  art  the  mind  expresses  itself  chiefly  in  apparently 
direct  feeling,  and  although  its  quality  carries  us  beyond 
the  particular  it  is  not  in  the  form  of  abstract  concepts 
that  it  does  so,  but  in  the  form  of  values  which  are  foun- 
dational  to  artistic  quality. 

However,  in  scientific  description  values  of  this  kind 
are  not  what  we  are  seeking  for,  and  the  power  of  imagina- 
tion has  to  be  kept  in  restraint.  The  metaphors  that  arise 
out  of  the  images  we  call  up,  even  in  the  strictest  thought, 
are  a  special  source  of  danger  in  scientific  and  philosophic 
investigation.  Because  they  are  metaphors,  and  there- 
fore representations  of  what  embodies  the  standpoints  of 
many  orders  of  thought,  they  are  slippery  as  symbols  for 
the  standpoint  of  any  one  particular  order.  When  we 
say  of  God  that  He  is  a  Spirit  we  glide  easily  into  regarding 
Him  as  a  "  magnified  and  non-natural  man,"  instead  of  as 
the  ideal  completion  of  immanent  mind.  If  we  talk  of 
a  "  finite  centre  "  as  a  form  of  consciousness  we  are  trying 
to  describe,  we  slip  into  words  which  lead  us  to  the  treat- 
ment of  feeling  as  though  it  could  be  a  mere  object,  self- 
subsistent  apart  from  any  subjective  moment.  And  yet 
we  know  nothing  of  the  jellyfish  that  seems  to  possess 
this,  nothing  of  whether  it  has  consciousness  that  though 
restricted  in  scope  is  yet  consciousness,  or  of  whether  the 
jellyfish  has  any  feeling  at  all.  The  expression  "  finite 
centre  "  is  a  metaphor  which  suggests  an  object  in  space, 
and  unless  closely  watched  the  name  conducts  us  towards 
what  are  mere  metaphysical  superstitions.  The  same 
thing  is  true  of  such  metaphorical  words  as  "  instant," 
"  point,"  "  cause,"  and  "  soul."  They  are  useful  if  we 
bear  steadily  in  mind  that  they  really  indicate  conceptions 
that  belong  to  certain  orders  in  reflection  only,  and  not 
separate  elements  in  any  individual  fact. 


THE  DANGER  OF  METAPHORS      225 

Without  such  metaphors  we  cannot  get  on.  They  are 
even  more  required  in  the  interpretation  symbolically  of 
our  thoughts  to  others  than  for  our  own  thinking.  For 
the  latter  purpose,  however,  they  remain  essential.  In  the 
exact  sciences  the  endeavour  is  made  with  some  measure 
of  success  to  get  over  the  danger  of  misleading  sugges- 
tion, by  the  adoption  of  special  and  technical  termin- 
ology. This  is  no  doubt  of  great  use,  but  it  is  never  wholly 
successful.  The  terminology  of  chemistry,  for  example, 
calls  up  at  every  turn  mental  pictures  of  atoms  and  mole- 
cules and  structures  of  which  we  have  and  can  have  no 
direct  experience.  That  such  ideas  should  be  true  in  fact 
is  a  valuable  working  hypothesis.  It  suggests  a  set  of 
general  conceptions  through  which  the  chemist  can  har- 
monise and  extend  his  knowledge.  But  if  he  claim  more 
than  this  kind  of  merely  relative  validity  for  his  theory 
he  comes  into  sharp  conflict  with  his  next-door  neighbour 
the  physicist,  who  will  have  none  of  his  idea  that  the 
chemical  atom  can  stand  for  more  than  a  mere  step  towards 
a  deeper  conception  of  matter.  And  the  physicist  in  his 
turn  is  pulled  up  by  the  mathematician  and  the  meta- 
physician, and  held  tight  until  he  admits  that  he,  too,  has 
been  dealing  only  with  provisional  abstractions  from 
concrete  actuality,  and  that  all  he  has  reached  is  a  further 
set  of  general  notions  of  merely  provisional  application 
about  certain  relations  which  experience  implies. 

Probably  no  branch  of  the  human  endeavour  after 
knowledge  has  suffered  so  much  from  the  dominance  of 
metaphor  as  has  philosophy.  In  this  region  images  do 
not  merely  mislead.  They  render  interpretation  immensely 
difficult.  Beauty  of  literary  style  in  philosophical  writing 
is  not  uncommon,  and  such  writing  often  exhibits  a  latent 
poetical  gift  that  is  highly  attractive.  From  the  Berke- 
leian  imagery  of  feelings  and  ideas  as  the  signs  through 
which  God  is  manifesting  Himself  to  us,  to  Hegel's  famous 
description  of  the  consummation  of  the  absolute  end  as 
consisting  in  the  removal  of  the  illusion  that  makes  it 
seem  yet  unaccomplished,  the  history  of  philosophy  con- 
tains a  long  record  of  splendid  metaphors.  But  the  first 
of  these  examples,  if  accepted  in  its  literal  implication, 
leads  us  straight  to  scepticism,  and  the  second  to  the 
notion  of  the  ultimately  real  as  a  totum  simul.  Neither 
consequence  was  intended  by  the  writer  of  the  words  from 


226          MANIFOLD   ORDERS   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

which  they  follow,  nor  will  such  a  consequence  follow  if 
the  image  is  stripped  of  its  misleading  colour,  and  inter- 
preted as  only  symbolic  of  what  cannot  be  painted  in 
words  as  a  picture  of  any  actual  experience.  The  reason- 
ing would  not  seem  so  convincing  if  the  colour  were 
stripped  away.  But  this  circumstance  does  not  detract 
from  the  real  truth,  which  is  that  the  metaphors  in 
question  produce  their  powerful  influence  on  us  simply 
because  they  stimulate  our  imaginative  faculty,  and  so 
appear  to  deliver  us  from  the  necessity  of  bearing,  without 
an  aid  that  is  as  artificial  as  it  is  trying,  the  hard  but 
necessary  burden  of  holding  as  tight  as  we  can  to  exact 
and  therefore  abstract  conceptions. 

I  am  far  from  wishing  to  suggest  that  any  branch  of 
description,  or  even  of  human  thought,  can  get  on  without 
a  copious  employment  of  metaphor.  That  is  because  the 
actual  is  always  concrete.  But  the  fact  remains  that 
the  actual  does  imply  in  its  meanings  and  in  itself 
relations  which  are  the  embodiment  of  what  reaches  over 
the  particularity  to  which  reality  owes  an  integral 
aspect,  but  only  an  aspect,  of  the  form  in  which  mind 
construes  it. 

This  conclusion  brings  us  back  to  the  source  of  all  our 
difficulties,  the  apparent  finiteness  of  the  mind  which 
must  express  itself  through  a  brain  that  not  merely  lives 
but  knows.  That  brain,  like  the  human  organism  itself 
as  the  entirety  within  which  the  brain  has  its  function  as 
a  member,  is  no  external  instrument  which  mind  wields. 
While  it  lives  and  works  its  significance  for  us  lies  in  the 
intelligence  which  it  in  itself  expresses.  This  significance 
is  inseparable  from  it  as  a  fact  in  experience.  But  the 
brain  is  mind  only  in  an  aspect  of  its  existence,  which  is 
but  one  among  many  aspects.  The  organism  that  sits 
in  a  chair  may  be  regarded  from  other  standpoints,  from 
which  it  is,  for  example,  a  thing  that  will  one  day  become 
merely  such,  and  be  carried  away  in  a  coffin.  The  char- 
acter of  being  a  living  organism,  and  a  fortiori  that  of 
being  experienced  as  an  intelligent  one,  terminates  with 
the  change  in  nature  called  death.  The  skeleton  which 
till  then  was  a  member  of  the  living  organism  drops  on 
that  event  into  the  different  character  of  being  a  mere 
mechanism,  an  imperfect  one  too,  for  the  end  is  no  longer 
operative  which  fashioned  its  development,  and  to  serve 


PERSONALITY    AND    SUPER-PERSONALITY     227 

which  the  living  self-arranging  activity  existed.  So  it 
will  be  with  me  some  day,  and  I  shall  become  for  others 
an  object  belonging  to  a  different  order  in  experience  from 
that  to  which  I  belong  to-day  for  myself  as  well  as  for 
those  others.  Moreover,  alike  as  I  am  now  or  as  I  shall 
appear  when  dead,  I  shall  have  ceased  to  be  as  I  appear 
now,  an  object  for  myself. 

Such  ceasing  to  be  will  have  its  consequences  in  the 
changed  experiences  of  other  finite  personalities.  My 
death  I  can  myself,  however,  contemplate  from  a  different 
point  of  view.  The  event  when  it  comes  will  occur  for 
me  as  within  my  object- world.  But  I  am  more  than  that 
object-world.  I  have  aspects  which  belong  to  an  order 
of  thought  higher  than  that  through  which  I  interpret 
myself  as  the  individual  sitting  in  this  chair.  My  per- 
sonality implies  concepts  which  are  of  a  quality  different 
from  those  of  the  here  and  the  now*  I  interpret  what 
I  am  from  above  downwards.  My  personality  is  not 
intelligible  when  regarded  as  merely  built  up  from  below 
out  of  fragments  that  belong  to  externality.  It  is  in  my 
mind,  in  so  far  as  that  mind  is  more  than  a  mere  object 
and  is  not  less  the  subject-self  in  which  experience  centres, 
that  this  experience  has  its  genuine  situation.  Subject 
and  object  are  only  intelligible  as  phases  falling  within  a 
higher  entirety.  That  entirety  is  no  thing.  It  is  nothing 
out  of  relation  to  mind  ;  it  is  of  the  character  of  subject ; 
it  is  the  expression  of  the  activity  of  thought.  Within 
the  field  over  which  it  reaches  are  reality  and  unreality, 
time  and  space,  truth  and  error,  righteousness  and  sin, 
beauty  and  ugliness.  These  and  all  other  distinctions  fall 
within  and  not  without  its  field.  Such  personality  is  more 
than  individual ;  it  is  rather  super-personal.  Higher  aspects 
of  reality  than  those  of  the  daily  life  of  a  living  and 
intelligent  organism  are  immanent  in  the  self-knowledge 
which  expresses  itself  in  me.  That  knowledge  extends  in 
principle  to  the  entire  universe,  for  that  universe  has  no 
significance  except  in  terms  of  its  concepts. 

Apart  from  this  view  of  the  self  and  the  content  that 
is  immanent  in  it,  the  doctrine  of  orders  or  degrees  in 
knowledge  and  reality  alike  appears  to  be  unintelligible. 
But,  once  accepted,  that  doctrine  and  the  consequential 
character  of  all  experience  which  it  carries  with  it  seem 
to  become  not  only  intelligible  but  inevitable.  The  view 


228          MANIFOLD   ORDERS   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

of  the  self  to  which  I  refer  throws  a  new  light  on  the 
meaning  of  what  we  call  evolution. 

Like  the  phenomena  of  the  rest  of  experience  those  of 
evolution  disclose  relations  belonging  to  varying  orders 
of  reality.  There  is  the  mere  externality  to  each  other  of 
the  periods  in  succession.  There  is  the  development  due 
to  the  control  by  a  quasi-purposive  yet  unintelligent  end. 
This  may  be  operative  from  the  very  beginning,  and  may 
still  require  for  its  accomplishment  a  tract  of  time.  It 
may  act  long  before  it  is  fully  accomplished,  as  it  does  in 
the  embryo  which,  though  undeveloped,  is  yet  in  posse 
the  complete  human  being,  or  even  in  the  picture  or  the 
poem  in  which  the  idea  which  requires  the  complete 
work  of  art  for  its  full  embodiment  yet  may  disclose 
itself  as  a  semi-conscious  inspiration  by  that  idea  in 
early  and  imperfect  stages.  The  end  as  final  cause  thus 
seems  to  act  although  distant  in  time  and  in  space  also 
from  the  culmination  of  its  operation,  and  to  differ  in  this 
respect  from  the  efficient  cause  of  physical  nature.  The 
developments  which  its  operation  brings  about  are  thus 
akin,  in  the  conceptions  required  to  render  it  intelligible, 
to  the  conceptions  which  belong  to  the  life  and  the  sphere 
of  the  organic. 

It  is  important  to  keep  such  distinctions  as  these  suffi- 
ciently closely  before  our  eyes,  if  we  are  to  estimate  aright 
the  appeals  made  to  us  by  those  Victorian  men  of  science 
who  asked  us  to  interpret  life,  not  through  the  concep- 
tions which  its  obvious  facts  force  on  us,  but  exclusively 
through  those  of  physics  and  chemistry.  I  am  not  refer- 
ring, in  saying  this,  to  the  author  of  The  Origin  of  Species. 
Charles  Darwin  laid  the  foundations  of  much  that  is 
characteristic  in  the  doctrine  of  biological  evolution  as  it 
is  coming  to  be  formulated  to-day,  formulated  as  com- 
prising in  its  reference  ends  as  well  as  outside  forces.  That 
was  because  he  studiously  confined  himself  as  closely  as 
he  could  to  actual  circumstances  which  his  genius  had 
enabled  him  to  detect  where  others  had  omitted  to 
observe  them.  Towards  the  end  of  the  book  Darwin 
tells  us  that  all  he  has  sought  to  do  is  to  show  that  species 
have  been  modified,  during  a  very  long  course  of  descent, 
by  the  preservation  through  natural  selection  of  many 
successive  slight  favourable  variations,  and  that  the 
theory  of  descent  with  modifications  embraces  all  the 


DARWIN    AND    HIS    CONTEMPORARIES        229 

members  of  the  same  class.  He  believed  that  animals 
have  descended  from  at  most  only  four  or  five  progenitors, 
and  plants  from  an  equal  or  lesser  number.  But  no- 
where did  this  close  observer  say  that  he  had  found  life 
originating  from  anything  but  life,  or  interpretable  as  mere 
mechanism.  His  doctrine  does  not  carry  him  beyond  the 
facts  of  life,  or  suggest  any  conceptions  lower  than  those 
which  belong  to  life  itself. 

I  am  thinking,  when  I  refer  to  biologists  of  the  Vic- 
torian period,  of  others  than  Darwin,  men  of  high  science, 
but  with  a  passion  for  the  principle  that  progress  in  time 
is  continuous  in  only  some  single  and  isolated  order  of 
knowledge,  and  does  not  take  place  by  breaks  ;  a  passion 
which  gave  rise  to  the  superimposed  conviction  that  all 
progress  can  be  represented  as  a  putting  together  of  an 
aggregate,  higher  simply  in  that  it  is  more  complex,  out  of 
elements  which  in  an  earlier  period  existed  as  separate 
mechanical  units  in  a  framework  of  external  relations. 
But  these  elements  are  in  truth  inseparable  save  in  reflec- 
tion from  a  larger  standpoint  with  which  they  are  always 
actually  associated.  Knowledge  may  increase  in  its  quality 
and  in  its  range,  and,  in  so  far  as  it  does,  may  exhibit 
conformity  to  a  principle  of  continuity.  But  this  con- 
tinuity arises  out  of  what  is  of  its  own  nature,  and  can  be 
rendered  only  in  terms  of  itself.  Of  course  there  is 
always  much  in  knowledge  that  is  implied  but  not  yet 
fully  developed,  and  this  may  be  latent  so  far  as  con- 
sciousness is  concerned.  But  even  so  it  is  still  of  the 
nature  of  knowledge,  although  the  aspect  may  appear  to 
be  throughout  mechanistic.  In  so  far  it  resembles  life, 
which  also  can  be  expressed  only  in  terms  of  the  concep- 
tions of  life,  and  never  in  terms  of  what  is  merely  mechani- 
cal. How  low  down  in  the  scale  of  quality  we  find  what  is 
actually  knowledge  and  marks  off  conscious  purpose  from 
both  mechanism  and  life,  it  is  not  easy  to  be  sure.  Does 
the  bee  act  with  knowledge  when  it  leaves  its  hive,  and 
goes  to  the  heather,  miles  distant,  afterwards  to  return 
laden  and  unerringly  find  its  home  ?  Is  it  under  the 
guidance  of  consciousness  that  it  constructs  the  comb 
with  an  exactness  which  rivals  that  of  the  most  highly 
trained  artificer  ?  Probably  not  !  The  quasi-purposive 
selection  is  here,  as  far  as  we  can  judge,  unconscious. 
Ends  are  operative,  but  ends  of  a  nature  differing  in 


230          MANIFOLD   ORDERS   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

characteristics  from  those  which  form  the  ideal  for  intelli- 
gence, as  well  as  from  the  even  lower  ends  which  realise 
themselves  merely  in  the  conservation  of  itself  by  the 
whole  in  bare  life.  Instinct  and  knowledge,  however 
difficult  to  distinguish  their  results  may  at  certain  points 
be,  seem  to  represent  separate  stages  in  the  influence  of 
ends  in  the  actual  world,  degrees  in  the  actuality  of  final 
causes  which  differ  in  character  and  in  kind,  and  the 
higher  of  which  are  irreducible  to  any  results  of  the  lower. 
In  time  life  never  grows  out  of  mechanism  ;  in  time 
knowledge  is  never  an  effect  of  the  action  that  is  merely 
living,  or  even  merely  instinctive.  Nature  exists  con- 
tinuously in  time.  She  does  not  proceed  per  saltum.  But 
her  continuity  of  growth  is  a  continuity  within  definite 
orders,  each  of  which  has  its  own  significance  and  not  that 
of  another  order. 

In  evolution  there  always  appear  to  be  relationships 
that  are  more  than  those  of  one  order.  Our  experience 
displays  a  development  which  belongs  not  merely  to  time, 
but  to  mind  also,  for  which  time  is.  The  higher  stands 
to  the  lower  at  once  as  that  in  comparison  with  which  the 
lower  is  less  perfect  because  more  abstract,  and  also  as 
the  more  concrete  individuality  within  the  limits  and 
range  of  which  the  lower  falls.  Thus,  as  we  have  seen, 
the  bare  event  is  only  an  abstraction  from  the  reality  of 
that  event  in  its  relations,  and  experience  as  Berkeley 
imaged  it  was  only  an  abstraction  from  the  significant 
experience  in  which  its  meaning  was  as  much  its  very  self 
as  was  the  factor  of  immediate  feeling.  Mere  static  being 
is  the  outcome,  as  abstract  as  it  is  unreal,  of  the  attempt 
of  the  mind  to  break  up  the  flowing  character  of  actual 
experience  into  isolated  instants  and  points.  Experience 
itself  finds  its  logical  and  factual  completion  in  the  mind 
for  which  it  is  experience.  And  mind  itself  has  its  truth  in 
that  higher  aspect  of  its  meaning  in  which  the  object  and 
subject  worlds  arise  only  by  distinction  made  within  itself 
in  the  course  of  the  activity  which  is  of  the  essence  of 
reflection. 

It  is  thus  that  in  analysis  the  different  orders  in  know- 
ledge and  reality  alike  appear  to  manifest  themselves,  and 
it  is  thus  that  knowledge  and  reality  turn  out  to  fall 
within  a  single  entirety.  The  relationship,  as  has  been 
already  observed,  is  not  one  of  time.  The  sequences  may 


THE    DIALECTICAL    CHARACTER  281 

even  apparently  invert  those  of  the  time-order.  They  do 
not  really  do  so.  For  it  is  through  these  very  sequences 
in  reflection  that  the  time -order  becomes  intelligible  and 
actual.  The  ultimate  relationship  is  one  of  conception, 
of  the  distinction  of  abstractions,  and  of  their  integration 
in  interpretation  from  being  only  abstractions  from  what 
is  more  concrete  and  therefore  more  true  to  the  character 
of  all  reality.  Such  a  relationship  in  thought  was  called 
by  the  Greeks  dialectical.  The  explanation  of  its  essence 
lies  in  its  insistence  that  all  explanation  is  one  of  self- 
developing  activity,  and  must  be  derived,  if  it  is  to  be 
adequate,  from  what  is  higher,  as  the  key  to  what  is  only 
a  fragment  of  its  riches.  "  The  fashion  of  this  world," 
said  Goethe,  "  passes  away,  and  I  would  fain  concern 
myself  only  with  that  which  is  abiding."  And  in  another 
passage  the  same  great  critic  of  human  experience  reminds 
us,  in  his  Spruche  in  Prosa,  of  that  which  illustrates  the 
underlying  principle  of  what  is  characteristic  in  his  teach- 
ing :  "  What  appear  to  be  intelligible  causes  lying  close  to 
hand  we  can  grasp,  and  they  are  therefore  readily  inter- 
preted by  us  as  being  such ;  for  which  reason  we  gladly 
take  that  to  be  mechanical  which  is  in  truth  of  a  higher 
order." 

The  higher  in  order  is  also  the  more  concrete.  It  is 
the  more  individual ;  not  only  individual  as  being  a  thing 
marked  off  from  other  things,  but  individual  in  the  sense 
of  its  reality  embodying  more  perfectly  the  union  of  par- 
ticular with  universal  in  what  transcends  them  both, 
reconciling  their  apparent  antithesis,  and  disclosing  its 
own  activity  as  the  true  source  of  the  distinction  between 
them.  We  cannot  see  or  hear  the  real  at  these  its  higher 
levels,  but  however  high  the  level  it  is  capable  of  grasp 
by  thought,  for  it  is  only  in  so  far  as  its  orders  belong  to 
thought  that  it  is  intelligible,  and  has  what  we  mean  by 
reality.  The  scepticism  which  denies  this  capacity  of 
thought  denies  its  own  power  of  explanation  and  contra- 
dicts itself.  The  method  of  mysticism  is  hardly  less  one 
of  negation,  and  it  is  thereby  that  mysticism  plunges 
itself  into  inconsistency.  Not  feeling  but  reflection  alone 
can  indicate  the  difficult  and  steep  path  which  must  be 
ascended  if  the  ultimate  character  of  reality  is  to  be 
reached.  For  reflection  has  created  all  the  problems,  and 
their  solutions  must  be  fashioned  by  itself. 


232         MANIFOLD   ORDERS  IN  KNOWLEDGE 

Our  experience  is  a  stage,  but  a  stage  only,  along  the 
path  towards  what  reflection  can  accept  as  full  compre- 
hension. For  in  an  experience  in  which  everything  is  in 
relation,  and  feeling  is  marked  off  from  thought  by  refer- 
ence to  organic  conditions,  the  ends  which  control  us  as 
particular  existences  compel  us  to  treat  the  self  to  which 
the  experience  is  referred  as  itself  object  within  its  own 
experience.  That  there  should  be  degrees  and  distinct 
orders  in  our  experience  thus  becomes  inevitable.  We  are 
finite  and  conditioned  by  the  character  of  the  organisms 
in  which  we  express  ourselves  in  our  aspects  as  phenomena 
of  nature  and  so  in  s^ace  and  time.  In  order  to  get  clear 
knowledge  we  finite  beings  have  to  limit  our  endeavours 
and  our  purposes.  We  start  from  where  we  find  our- 
selves. The  starting-point  is  the  "  That "  of  experience. 
We  are  what  we  are,  and  we  cannot  take  in  at  any  one 
moment  all  the  forms  of  what  it  is  abstractly  possible 
for  us  to  perceive.  But  not  the  less  the  power  of  reflec- 
tion in  conceptual  form  is  so  free  from  hindrance  that  it 
can  pass  beyond  the  limits  which  our  contact  with  nature 
through  the  limits  of  our  senses  imposes  on  direct  percep- 
tion, and  that  it  can  interpret,  indirectly  and  by  reasoning, 
the  universe,  as  not  made  up  of  the  fragments  we  see  and 
feel  and  hear,  but  as  the  larger  ideal  whole  towards  the 
realisation  of  which  reflection  ever  presses  in  its  efforts 
to  attain  to  complete  experience.  Such  a  whole  know- 
ledge seems  to  presuppose  as  the  foundation  of  the 
orderliness  of  existence  and  of  the  uniformity  of  nature. 
It  breaks  it  up  no  doubt  by  abstractions,  made  for  the 
accomplishment  of  purposes  which  if  essential  are  tem- 
porary, into  aspects  which  it  isolates  from  each  other,  and 
which  individual  freedom  varies.  This  it  does  in  order 
to  make  practicable  distinctness,  not  only  in  pictorial 
representation,  but  in  the  reflection  which  is,  after  all,  that 
of  a  mind  subject  to  bodily  limitations  of  its  power.  The 
partial  aspects  so  presented  owe  much  of  their  frag- 
mentary character  and  mutual  exclusiveness  to  the  imagery 
that  goes  with  sense-perception,  but  in  the  end  they  really 
owe  their  quality  to  the  particular  conceptions  or  cate- 
gories to  which  reflection  has  temporarily  abandoned  itself, 
in  order  to  divert  its  result  from  much  else  that  is  possible, 
but  is  irrelevant  to  the  purposes  of  the  particular  effort  at 
interpretation  that  is  being  made.  Each  aspect  may  thus 


KINDS    OF    KNOWLEDGE  233 

be  seen  to  stand  for  a  stage  in  reflection  and  to  belong  to  a 
degree  or  order  in  experience.  Its  general  character  is 
what  it  derives  from  the  category  or  conception  by  which 
it  is  confined  and  distinguished,  and  the  working  image 
is  formed  accordingly. 

Our  presentations  owe  their  separateness  and  apparent 
conflict  to  the  fact  that  they  are  distinctive  of  their  own 
orders  or  levels  in  reflection  and  in  the  experience  which 
is  fashioned  by  reflection.  They  are  brought  under  the 
general  conceptions  with  which  reflection  operates  when 
it  confines  itself  to  a  particular  order  of  thought.  When 
we  reflect  we  abstract,  that  is  we  exclude  from  our  atten- 
tion all  that  does  not  concern  our  present  purpose,  and 
we  generalise  and  construct  in  reflection  only  under  the 
logical  conceptions  that  are  appropriate  to  our  standpoint. 
Thus  when  we  study  a  human  being  we  may  for  one  set 
of  purposes  treat  him  as  a  system  of  matter  and  energy, 
for  another  set  as  living,  and  for  a  third  as  a  self-conscious 
and  free  personality.  If  the  principle  I  have  just  been 
stating  be  true  it  is  a  sheer  fallacy  to  assume  that  because 
one  of  these  views  of  him  is,  taken  by  itself,  justifiable,  the 
others  are  therefore  false.  Each  may  be  adequate  in  the 
order  in  experience  with  which  for  the  time  being  we 
are  concerned,  and  for  each  view  what  appears  for  the 
moment  to  constitute  truth  and  reality  may  be  accurately 
described  in  terms  of  the  conceptions  appropriate  to  the 
standpoint  which  we  are  occupying.  But  this,  of  course, 
can  only  be  so  if  we  have  remembered  that  truth  and 
reality  imply  still  more  than  what  in  virtue  of  our  abstrac- 
tions they  are  being  taken  to  amount  to,  and  that  there- 
fore no  single  order  of  conceptions  can  be  adequate  to 
complete  study.  The  abstract  views  obtained  by  the 
application  of  categories  or  particular  orders  must,  in 
other  words,  be  taken  as  representing,  not  separate 
entities,  but  separate  kinds  of  knowledge  about  reality. 
This  is  what  is  implied  when  we  accept  the  general  principle 
of  the  relativity  of  knowledge. 

The  importance  of  the  doctrine  of  degrees  in  knowledge, 
truth,  and  reality  is  that  it  insists  on  the  conclusions  of  our 
various  inquiries  into  what  appears  directly  to  confront 
us  as  being  in  fact  the  outcome  of  a  series  of  experiments 
and  processes  of  observation  and  reflection  by  which  we 
have  stripped  the  actual,  and  presented  it  through  our 


234         MANIFOLD   ORDERS   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

various  sciences  in  exclusive  aspects  due  to  the  confining 
effect  of  abstraction.  We  do  not  take  in  all  the  phases  of 
our  object- world  at  one  and  the  same  time,  nor  can  any 
single  phase  be  for  us  exhaustive  of  the  facts  as  they  are 
for  knowledge  of  other  orders.  Even  within  a  particular 
order  this  may  be  so.  The  revolutionary  changes  which 
Einstein  has  introduced  into  the  mathematical  theory  of 
the  forms  and  measurements  of  space  and  time,  were 
introduced  by  showing  that  conceptions  belonging  to 
customary  mathematical  physics  had  been  applied  in 
a  fashion  that  had  rendered  them  too  narrow  for  possible 
aspects  cognisable  within  their  own  order.  The  general 
fallacy  into  which  we  are  apt  to  fall  is  that  of  hypostatising 
conceptions  which  special  sciences  have  framed  for  their 
own  purposes  in  interpretation  into  images  supposed  to 
be  exhaustive  of  final  reality  ;  whereas  in  truth  such 
conceptions  are  only  the  means  by  which  we  concentrate 
attention,  and  by  an  interpretation,  the  apparent  clear- 
ness of  which  is  due  to  the  ease  in  application  that  results 
from  its  narrow  demands,  enable  ourselves  to  frame 
images  and  make  predictions.  The  images  so  framed  are 
the  main  source  of  our  difficult ies.  We  must  always  be 
on  our  guard  when  we  detect  ourselves  indulging  in  the 
temptation  to  stereotype  a  general  principle  into  an 
imagined  picture  of  reality. 

No  doubt  it  is  difficult  to  resist  the  tendency  to  express 
general  truths  in  metaphorical  form.  We  start  in  our 
experience  from  the  recognition  of  things  as  separate  from 
each  other  in  space  and  time,  and  we  tend  to  come  back 
to  this,  our  original  and  natural  form  of  experience.  But 
if  we  construct  spatial  and  temporal  images  of  qualities 
and  relations  that  are  for  logic  only  universals,  we  are, 
however  inevitably,  robbing  them  of  that  in  their  nature 
which  constitutes  them  universals.  They  become  when 
visualised  mutually  exclusive  and  repellent  entities.  Now 
it  is  just  this  character  which  is  foreign  to  the  nature  of 
thought,  in  which  the  universal  has  its  real  home.  Our 
daily  experience  as  men  and  women  teaches  us  that  in  our 
thinking  even  our  most  precise  and  definite  concentration 
is  never  of  an  exclusive  character.  Our  thinking  is  always 
carrying  us  beyond  our  frame  of  mind  at  the  moment.  It 
seems  to  reach  beyond  every  phase  which  it  isolates  in 
general  conceptions,  so  long  as  they  remain  general  in  their 


THOUGHT    ALWAYS    UNFOLDING    ITSELF       235 

character,  and  are  not  stereotyped  into  images  separated 
in  imagined  space  and  time.  Even  in  the  latter  case  they 
carry  us  beyond  themselves,  for  they  are  symbolic  of  more 
than  they  can  express.  Our  thinking  becomes  distorted 
and  inadequate  if  we  fail  to  realise  that  it  is  only  by  the 
recognition  of  larger  wholes  than  those  with  which  for 
the  moment  we  are  concerned  that  truth  is  to  be  reached. 
That  is  why  we  distinguish  men  and  women  into  narrow- 
minded  and  large-minded,  and  approve  what  we  call  a 
"  synoptic  "  view  when  we  hear  of  it.  In  so  doing  we 
recognise  the  dialectical  character  of  knowledge  as  essen- 
tial in  it. 

The  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter  thus  seems  to  be 
that  thought,  the  nature  of  which  is  to  be  dynamic  and 
not  static,  and  to  tend  in  all  cases  to  pass  beyond  the 
result  which  it  has  attained,  is  in  constant  process  of 
unfolding  further  conceptions  than  those  on  which  it 
concentrates.  These  further  conceptions  may  belong  to 
the  same  order  in  knowledge  or  to  other  orders.  In  the 
actual  object  of  experience  the  orders  are  concurrent, 
even  if  only  implicitly  so.  In  one  or  other  of  them  we 
abstract  from  the  context  and  form  images  which  are 
exclusive  in  the  sense  that  they  are  determined  by  the 
particular  conception  that  has  guided  us  in  framing  them. 
They  are  therefore  inadequate  to  the  full  truth,  the  ideal 
of  which  is  always  a  larger  and  fuller  whole.  What  is 
abstract  and  so  inadequate  is  thus  the  outcome  of  the 
process  of  judgment  at  its  narrower  stages,  and  the 
inadequacy  and  abstractness  diminish  as  our  judgments 
complete  themselves.  That  is  why  we  are  always  more 
than  we  seem  to  ourselves  to  be.  It  is  of  the  essence  of 
mind  that  this  should  be  so. 

As  we  exist  under  conditions  arising  from  the  particu- 
larity of  the  organisms  in  which  minds  are  expressed 
and  have  plurality  as  objects  in  nature,  we  are  hampered 
in  our  freedom  of  thinking  by  what  is  not  separable 
from  the  character  of  mind  treated  as  a  finite  centre. 
But  we  are  none  the  less  more  than  finite  centres  and 
than  mere  monads  to  which,  in  effect,  the  category  of 
substance  has  been  applied  in  defining  them.  For  thought 
does  not  consist  in  any  simple  series  of  events  in  time.  It 
is  that  the  correspondence  of  which  discloses  true  identity 
as  the  foundation  of  difference.  In  so  far  as  we  think  and 


236         MANIFOLD   ORDERS   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

know  we  are  more  than  finite  individuals.  Identity  of 
thought  brings  each  of  us  within  a  single  universe,  the 
foundation  of  which  is  that  conceptually  it  is  the  same 
for  all  of  us,  and  that  outside  it  we  cannot  travel  even  in 
reflection.  Its  recognition  as  concerned  with  the  entirety 
is  indeed  the  foundational  basis  of  reflection. 

How  is  this  universe  to  be  conceived  ?  Only  by  an 
abstraction  that  is  inadequate  can  we  regard  it  merely  as 
a  possible  object  confronting  intelligence.  For  within  its 
scope  falls  intelligence  itself,  subject  not  less  than  object. 
And  it  is  in  the  aspect  of  subject  that  it  has  its  character- 
istic as  the  entirety  within  which  every  distinction  falls. 

From  this  point  of  view  the  theory  of  the  relativity  of 
knowledge  derives  a  meaning  wider  than  that  which  the 
physicists  give  to  it.  It  delivers  us,  in  this  extension  of 
its  meaning,  from  difficulties  even  greater  than  those 
which  trouble  the  physicists  themselves.  For  it  shows  us 
that  the  material  and  the  spiritual  are  not  separate  and 
self-subsisting  facts,  but  are  illustrations  of  different 
fashions  in  which  reality  presents  itself  when  regarded 
from  standpoints  divergent  in  the  logical  character  of 
their  methods.  There  is  no  more  striking  illustration  of 
the  difficulties  that  arise  when  this  wider  significance  of 
relativity  as  the  principle  is  not  realised,  than  the  particular 
problems  connected  with  human  personality. 

Among  the  useful  illustrations  of  the  confusion  of 
thought  that  arises  when  the  aspects  of  such  personality 
which  belong  to  one  order  of  thought  are  assumed  to  be 
cognisable  in  terms  of  conceptions  belonging  to  another 
order,  is  the  controversy  as  to  determinism.  Are  our  acts 
of  will  brought  about  by  antecedent  conditions,  or  are 
they  spontaneous  in  the  sense  that  they  are  uncaused  ? 
The  true  answer  seems  to  be  that  the  question  is  irrational, 
inasmuch  as  no  problem  of  cause  and  effect  can  arise. 
Volition  is  inherently  the  activity  of  reason.  In  the  exercise 
of  reason  we  may  err,  just  as  we  may  sin.  But  the  exercise 
is  that  of  the  creative  activity  of  mind  itself,  an  activity 
that  is  not  an  event  apart  from  the  mind  that  exercises  it. 
We  are  rational  in  so  far  as  we  express  reasoned  judg- 
ments. They  may  be  right  or  they  may  be  wrong.  But 
they  are  not  the  effects  of  causes  external  to  them.  It 
is  the  analogy  of  space  and  time  relations  which  has  misled 
here.  Mind  exists  in  its  judgments,  not  apart  from  them. 


UNREAL    DIFFICULTIES  237 

There  is  no  difficulty  in  accepting  this  fact  if  we  do  not 
drag  in  physical  analogies,  and  represent  to  ourselves 
mental  processes  as  aspects  of  reality  at  the  level  where 
causation  is  fundamental.  /  think,  /  judge,  /  will.  We 
are  here  concerned  with  no  phenomenon  of  nature  as 
stretched  out  in  a  series  of  objects  independent  of  each 
other,  but  with  subject  as  such,  an  aspect  cognisable 
only  in  terms  of  conceptions  which  are  appropriate  to 
itself  alone.  The  principle  of  degrees  guides  us  in  this 
instance  as  elsewhere.  Thought  is  neither  determined 
ab  extra  nor  is  an  uncaused  phenomenon  of  nature.  For 
its  character  is  that  of  subject,  and  the  minds  of  other 
men  must  be  interpreted  in  the  same  terms  as  my  own, 
terms  which  recognise  that  I  find  the  mind  which  is 
myself  in  other  minds,  expressed  no  doubt  in  organisms 
external  to  mine  so  far  as  they  are  merely  physical,  but 
more  than  merely  physical  in  so  far  as  they  express  thoughts 
and  a  freedom  of  self-determination  corresponding  to  and 
by  so  much  identical  with  those  of  which  I  am  conscious 
in  my  own  self. 

The  principle  of  degrees  thus  lays  unreal  spectral 
appearances  which  are  only  alarming  because  they  are 
bogies  which  we  have  ourselves  conjured  up.  It  teaches 
us  that  the  whole  of  the  mind  is  present  implicitly  in  every 
particular  activity  of  the  mind.  It  bids  us  look  away 
from  the  analogy  of  mere  sequences  of  events  in  time 
as  inadequate  to  what  we  are  observing.  No  doubt 
psychology  does  often  treat  what  it  calls  the  phenomena 
of  mental  action  as  if  they  could  properly  be  so  named. 
But  valuable  as  is  its  method,  in  the  same  fashion  as  is 
the  method  of  the  chemist  who  investigates  the  chemistry 
of  the  living  organism  of  high  value,  the  method  cannot  be 
applied  except  by  making  violent  abstractions,  useful 
from  the  points  of  view  of  other  sciences,  but  inadequate 
for  that  from  which  we  seek  to  observe  the  ultimate  char- 
acter of  reality.  It  is  not  by  treating  mind  as  an  external 
instrument,  but  by  watching  the  self-explanatory  develop- 
ment within  as  well  as  apart  from  self-conscious  activity, 
that  we  get  at  its  characteristic  nature. 

The  history  of  speculative  thought  is  the  narrative  of 
a  series  of  efforts  to  replace  the  inadequate  method  of 
explanation  from  below  by  the  exhibition  of  the  lower 
orders  in  thought  and  their  contents  as  abstractions  from 

17 


238         MANIFOLD   ORDERS   IN   KNOWLEDGE 

what  is  higher  and  in  reality  more  concrete.  The  actual 
is  in  this  view  under  all  conditions  what  must  in  the  end 
be  stated  in  terms  that  are  those  of  the  domain  of  mind. 
The  effort  to  do  this  has  always  shown  itself  to  be  attended 
with  a  certain  danger.  We  are  prone  when  we  make  it  to 
try  to  exhibit  the  source  of  our  experience  as  something 
different  from  what  knowledge  reveals,  an  absolute,  it 
may  be,  which  our  individual  knowledge  either  cannot 
wholly  compass  or  which,  if  attainable,  is  only  to  be 
attained  by  some  method  differing  for  us  wholly  in  char- 
acter from  any  with  which  experience  has  made  us  familiar. 
Metaphysicians,  by  tacitly  introducing  the  notion  of  the 
source  of  human  experience  as  something  of  a  different 
nature  from  itself,  have  carried  the  idea  of  the  difference 
so  far  as  to  suggest  a  separation  which  is  nothing  if  not 
numerical,  and  which  suggests  the  introduction  of  the 
category  of  substance  by  the  metaphors  employed.  But  it 
is  not  such  a  category  as  substance  that  can  be  adequate  in 
this  connection.  What  we  have  to  do  is  simply  to  observe 
the  various  orders  in  reflection  as  they  are  exemplified  in 
what  we  know,  and  to  distinguish  them,  not  as  separate 
existences,  but  as  disclosed  simultaneously  in  the  actual. 
They  are  not  only  appearances.  They  are  all  essential 
inasmuch  as  mind  has  to  recognise  them  all  as  present  in 
the  constitution  of  experience.  To  anything  beyond  that 
experience  and  separable  from  it  they  do  not  carry  us. 
They  only  exhibit  it  with  new  meanings.  The  higher 
the  order  necessitated  for  reflection  the  nearer  we  come 
to  the  recognition  of  that  ideal  adequacy  and  complete- 
ness which  forms  the  ultimate  standard  of  truth. 

If  knowledge  were  some  sort  of  instrument  distinct  in 
existence  from  its  object,  this  view  would  give  rise  to 
difficulties.  The  question  would  arise  whether  there  was 
not  some  kind  of  reality  existing  independently  of  the 
subject  in  knowledge.  But  if  the  distinction  between  the 
subject  and  what  appears  to  confront  it  is  a  distinction 
which  is  due  to  reflection  itself  this  question  does  not 
emerge.  For  knowledge,  taken  in  the  wide  meaning  in 
which  it  includes  the  various  forms  of  subjective  activity, 
appears  to  be  foundational,  or  in  other  words  presupposed  as 
the  very  commencement  and  condition  of  experience.  The 
object- world  is  of  the  same  character  as  the  self  for  which 
it  is  there,  and  both  of  them  fall  within  an  entirety.  To 


REALISM   MAY   CONVERGE   TO    IDEALISM    239 

ask  how  it  is  that  we  have  any  knowledge  at  all  is  to  put 
a  mistaken  question.  The  relevant  question  is  how  know- 
ledge is  confined  by  the  organism  in  which  it  expresses  itself. 
Knowledge  is  itself  a  final  fact.  Knower  and  known  fall 
within  it.  That  I  see  or  feel  or  hear  the  world,  or  that  I 
transform  it  conceptually,  is  an  ultimate  truth  which 
cannot  be  explained  as  the  result  of  anything  beyond 
itself.  The  object- world  is  actual  apart  from  the  percipient 
and  reflective  organism.  So  far  this  is  realism.  But  it 
must  always  be  added  that  it  is  only  at  a  certain  stage  in 
reflection  and  by  the  employment  of  certain  concepts  that 
the  distinction  between  knower  and  known  arises.  It  is 
a  distinction  which  is  characterised  by  relativity.  The 
more  we  reflect  and  the  more  complete  the  grasp  of  know- 
ledge the  less  the  differentiation  seems  justifiable  or  of 
importance.  The  further  we  proceed  the  more  does  mind 
find  mind  in  what  confronts  it.  If  we  take  self-conscious- 
ness and  eliminate,  as  far  as  our  habitual  modes  of  framing 
working  hypotheses  permit  us  to  do  so,  the  idea  of  a 
thing  in  space  confronted  by  another  thing,  we  must 
find  ourselves  concerned  with  thought  and  no  longer  with 
externality.  Even  the  physical  doctrine  of  relativity 
forces  this  on  our  attention,  and  leads  us  towards  the  view 
that  the  question  between  idealism  and  realism  is  an  idle 
one.  The  actual  is  meaningless  except  in  terms  of  know- 
ledge, and  that  knowledge  can  only  describe  itself  if  the 
full  variety  of  its  orders  is  recognised  as  essentially  implied 
in  it. 


PART   III 

OTHER   VIEWS  ABOUT  THE  NATURE  OF  THE 

REAL 


CHAPTER    XI 

GREEK   PHILOSOPHY 

IN  the  preceding  chapters  I  have  examined  from  a  modern 
point  of  view  the  principle  of  degrees  in  reality,  and  the 
question  of  the  relation  of  mind  to  the  object- world  which 
the  doctrine  appears  to  necessitate.  In  the  present  chapter 
I  wish  to  illustrate  what  I  have  said  by  pointing  out  that 
the  conclusion  reached  is  not  peculiar  to  modern  tendencies 
in  philosophy,  but  is  to  be  found  in  unmistakable  sub- 
stance in  the  ideas  of  antiquity.  I  propose  to  take  as  my 
main  illustrations  the  teaching  of  Aristotle  and  of  Plotinus 
respectively. 

One  has  always  to  be  careful"  not  to  read  into  the 
language  used  by  the  Greeks  more  than  is  really  there. 
But  it  is  at  least  clear  that  they  were  more  free  than  we 
are  from  certain  hindrances,  amounting  almost  to  obses- 
sions, which  impede  modern  thought.  Their  philosophy 
is,  if  on  this  account  alone,  particularly  instructive  when 
we  have  to  try  to  realise  the  true  character  of  the  relation 
of  the  mind  to  what  it  knows.  For  the  methods  of  physical 
science  had  not  progressed  with  them  so  powerfully  as  to 
make  it  hard  to  break  through  what  has  grown  into  a 
habit,  and  to  look  on  thought  and  what  it  apprehends 
as  in  a  relation  quite  different  from  that  of  causal  activity 
between  things  of  foreign  natures.  In  common  with  the 
New  Realists  of  to-day  the  Greeks  did  not  hesitate  to 
find  universals  in  the  object- world,  as  real  as  any  par- 
ticulars of  sense.  Relations  were  for  them  actually 
present,  just  as  they  are  said  to  be  by  those  New  Realists 
who  have  thrown  aside  the  prejudices  of  the  crude  and 
empirical  realism  of  recent  times  and  have  declined  any 
longer  to  try  to  separate  the  non-mental  from  the  mental 
world  by  assigning  to  the  latter  exclusively  universals, 
and  attributing  to  the  former  a  particularist  nature 
accessible  only  through  sensation. 

243 


244  GREEK  PHILOSOPHY 

It  is,  as  I  have  already  insisted,  only  a  superficial  pre- 
judice that  leads  people,  in  reading  the  history  of  philo- 
sophy, to  seek  for  the  mere  supersession  of  system  by 
system.  In  science,  which  is  to  a  great  extent  dependent 
on  exact  observation  and  measurement,  a  subsequent 
result,  founded  on  more  precise  experiment,  may  wholly 
displace  an  earlier  view.  In  the  history  of  art,  which  docs 
not  depend  on  the  recording  of  quantitative  facts,  I 
pointed  out  that  the  standard  of  truth  about  value  is 
a  different  one.  And  I  added  that  in  philosophy,  which 
looks  for  larger  wholes,  and  for  orders  in  arrangement 
beyond  those  inquired  after  by  physical  and  natural 
science,  the  student  who  seeks  for  the  most  adequate 
light  on  the  nature  of  reality  is  no  more  safe  in  dis- 
regarding the  past  than  is  the  student  of  the  history  of 
literature.  The  story  of  the  growth  of  philosophy  must  be 
read  in  the  entirety  of  that  story,  and  it  may  be  found 
that  far  back  even  the  greatest  conceptions  have  been 
attained.  For  philosophical  insight  of  a  high  order  is 
not  like  what  results  from  a  successful  experiment  in  the 
laboratory.  Its  principle  is  of  a  nature  more  akin  to  the 
insight  of  a  great  literary  critic,  an  insight  which  remains 
of  high  value  for  all  time.  The  world  will  continue  to 
read  Plato  and  Aristotle  and  Plotinus,  just  as  it  will 
continue  to  read  Homer  and  Shakespeare  and  Goethe. 
The  fashion  of  the  period  may  have  wholly  passed  away, 
but  there  remains  an  underlying  substance  of  a  quality 
that  is  abiding. 

It  is  characteristic  of  the  most  mature  forms  of  Grecian 
thought  to  decline  to  look  for  the  final  reality  of  the 
universe  in  an  experience  built  up  by  the  aggregation  and 
succession  of  simple  and  self-subsisting  units  external  to 
each  other.  A  real  so  constituted  would  for  them  have 
been  a  uniform  structure  of  a  single  nature.  It  would 
have  had  no  transition  in  it,  no  dynamic  character  of 
becoming  instead  of  merely  being.  It  would  have  existed 
as  possessing  in  all  its  aspects  a  nature  wholly  alien  to 
that  of  the  mind  which  observed  it.  Accordingly  the 
difficulties  that  have  driven  us  moderns  towards  subjective 
idealism  as  a  possible  way  of  escape  from  captivity  to  space 
and  time  did  not  trouble  the  Greek  philosophers  nearly 
to  the  same  extent  that  they  have  troubled  us.  For 
Greek  thinkers,  those  like  Plato  and  Aristotle  at  all 


THE    PLATONIC    IDEAS  245 

events,  found  no  such  apparently  final  line  of  demarcation 
between  the  object- world  and  the  mind  that  knew  it  as 
should  make  them  desire  to  resolve  either  into  the  other. 
They  did  not  consider  themselves  called  on  to  attribute 
much  of  the  world  of  nature  to  the  subjective  activity  of 
intelligence.  They  thought  it  natural  that  such  a  world 
should  disclose  features  differing  wholly  in  kind  and 
quality,  irreducible  to  each  other  and  including  phases 
of  an  order  as  high  as  that  of  the  Platonic  Ideas.  For 
them  attempts  to  apportion  reality  and  to  share  it 
between  a  mental  and  a  non-mental  world  were  without 
importance.  One  reason  was  their  freedom  from  the 
obsession  that  mind  must  be  a  sort  of  substance  operated 
on  ab  extra.  For  Aristotle,  to  quote  him  as  the  example, 
when  we  know  we  take  in  what  confronts  us.  But  for 
him,  as  for  Plato  before  him,  what  confronts  us  is  no 
mere  aggregate  of  atomic  particulars.  It  is  a  real  which 
is  of  a  character  akin  to  that  of  mind  itself. 

Aristotle  refused  to  countenance  the  treatment  by  his 
great  predecessor  of  the  Platonic  Ideas  as  if  they  could 
be  immobile  existences  apart.  He  did  not  wholly  reject 
the  Platonic  doctrine,  but  he  regarded  experience  as  not  dis- 
closing the  gulf  between  the  Ideas  and  the  extended  world 
which  that  doctrine  seemed  to  him  to  imply.  For  him 
form  was  not  separable  from  its  matter.  The  latter  was 
the  merely  possible,  which  was  just  a  stage  in  a  continuous 
translation  towards  actuality,  characteristic  of  a  process 
of  Becoming  which  had  the  realisation  of  form  as  its  deter- 
mining end.  It  was  a  logical  evolution  in  which  there  was 
no  hiatus.  Even  matter  itself  was  not  a  sheer  negation 
of  the  actual ;  it  was  a  stage  on  the  road  in  thought 
towards  the  actual.  In  the  language  of  modern  idealism 
matter  and  form  were  logical  moments  in  the  process  of 
the  actual  rather  than  separate  elements  in  its  constitu- 
tion. Thus  the  educated  man  was  one  with  whom  it  had 
throughout  been  possible,  because  of  an  inherent  capacity, 
which  was  other  than  the  limited  potentiality  of  the  brute, 
that  he  should  become  educated.  He  stood  as  form  to  a 
possibility  which  was  implied  by  the  fact  of  his  having 
become  educated.  While  Aristotle  would  not,  like  Plato, 
regard  the  Idea  as  a  universal  subsisting  by  itself  outside 
sense-experience,  and  while  he  regarded  our  knowledge 
as  beginning  in  time  with  experience  through  the  senses,  he 


246  GREEK  PHILOSOPHY 

yet  agreed  with  Plato  in  thinking  that  the  non-sensible 
form  was  present  in  the  object  and  in  all  knowledge  of 
it  and  remained  unaffected  through  changing  experience. 
The  Universe  could  thus  be  looked  on  by  him  as  con- 
taining within  itself  successive  phases  in  the  transition 
to  more  perfect  form.  But  these  phases  were  no  results 
of  causation  in  space  or  even  of  mere  passage  in  time. 
They  were  capable  of  definition  only  as  levels  at  which 
thought  was  progressively  real  in  things  and  things  in 
thought. 

Although  in  studying  Aristotle  one  finds  the  substance 
of  this  doctrine,  and  is  impressed  with  his  desire  to  insist 
on  it,  yet  his  reader  has  to  recognise  that  he  was  not 
always  successful  in  making  it  a  matter  of  what  appears 
like  consistent  presentation.  It  is  only  necessary  to 
examine  the  writings  of  the  various  commentators  on  his 
system  in  order  to  see  that,  in  expression  at  least,  he  was 
often  ambiguous.  Zeller,  for  instance,  in  the  exposition 
of  Aristotle's  principle  of  the  Primum  Mobile  in  chapter  vii 
of  the  volume  on  Aristotle  in  his  Philosophy  of  the  Greeks, 
says  that  he  confines  the  function  of  "  the  Divine  Reason 
to  a  monotonous  self-contemplation,  not  quickened  into 
life  by  any  change  or  development,"  and  so  "  merges  the 
notion  of  personality  in  a  mere  abstraction."  Quoting 
Aristotle's  own  expressions  he  points  out  that  the  latter 
declares  that  "  God  moves  the  world  in  this  way ;  the 
object  of  desire  and  the  object  of  thought  cause  motion 
without  moving  themselves."  "  The  final  cause  operates 
like  a  loved  object,  and  that  which  is  moved  by  it  com- 
municates motion  to  the  rest."  This,  says  Zeller,  is  so 
obscure  as  to  be  almost  unintelligible  to  us.  Commenting 
on  the  opinion  so  expressed  Dr.  Edward  Caird,  in  his 
searching  examination  of  Aristotle's  doctrine  in  vol.  ii 
of  The  Evolution  of  Theology  in  the  Greek  Philosophers 
(Lectures  XIV  and  XV),  points  out  that  such  a  new  kind 
of  action,  a  self-determination  which  is  above  movement 
or  change,  can  only  be  one  which  is  purely  ideal  or  spiritual, 
such  as  that  by  which  we  set  before  us  an  end,  and  make 
it  the  object  of  endeavour.  This,  he  observes,  is  im- 
possible to  take  as  adequately  representative  of  the 
activity  of  a  perfect  being,  for  there  can  be  no  external 
end  or  independent  final  cause  of  activity  for  such  a  being. 
Aristotle  felt  himself  forced  to  represent  it  as  one  which 


ZELLER    AND    CAIRD  247 

was  in  the  world  and  not  in  God.  And  he  therefore  failed 
to  show  either  how  the  spiritual  being  can  be  conceived  as 
originating  such  movement  or  change  in  a  finite  world, 
or  how  he  is  himself  related  to  it  in  any  way. 

Still,  writes  Dr.  Caird,  it  is  evident  that  Aristotle  does 
conceive  God  in  a  higher  way.  He  likens  the  Universe  to 
an  army,  the  excellence  of  which  lies  in  its  order,  but  is 
separately  embodied  in  the  General  through  whom  the 
order  comes  into  it.  He  takes  Aristotle  really  to  mean 
that  although  God  cannot  think  anything  lower  than 
Himself,  such  as  is  the  finite  world  in  space  and  time  and 
contingency,  He  can  still  think  of  it  in  its  order,  in  the 
types  that  are  realised  in  it.  The  Divine  intelligence  must 
therefore  have  been  really  conceived  by  Aristotle,  not  as 
an  abstract  self -consciousness,  but  "  as  gathering  all  the 
ideal  forms  that  are  realised  in  the  world  into  the  unity 
of  one  thought."  And  in  support  of  this  view  he  quotes 
passages  from  the  Metaphysics.  The  difficulty,  he  goes 
on  to  add,  arises  for  two  reasons.  The  first  is  the  ten- 
dency of  Aristotle  to  the  dualism  between  a  pure  intelli- 
gence which  is  eternally  one  with  itself,  and  transcends 
the  distinction  between  subject  and  object,  and  the  other 
is  the  conception,  not  consistently  eliminated,  of  a  world 
of  change,  made  up  of  parts  external  to  each  other,  and 
failing  to  attain  unity.  The  ideal  form  is  looked  on  as 
complete  in  itself  and  not  as  realising  itself  in  matter. 
Form  and  matter  are  never  brought  completely  together. 
The  second  reason  to  which  Dr.  Caird  draws  attention 
is  due  to  the  tendency  of  Aristotle  to  set  up  an  abstract 
opposition  of  the  theoretical  to  the  practical,  of  contem- 
plation to  action.  The  result  is  the  division  of  God  from 
His  world,  and  of  reason  from  volition.  Nevertheless 
Dr.  Caird  thinks  that  Aristotle  had  in  his  system  the  sense 
of  a  more  thoroughgoing  solution.  Idealism,  he  says, 
"  will  not  fear  to  admit  the  reality  of  that  which  is  other 
than  mind,  and  even  in  a  sense  diametrically  opposed  to 
it ;  for  it  rests  on  a  perception  that  these  are  yet  neces- 
sarily related,  and  that  both  are  different  and  correlated 
aspects  of  one  whole."  It  is  true,  he  thinks,  that  Aristotle 
maintains  the  existence  of  a  material  and  therefore  un- 
intelligible element  in  the  Universe,  corresponding  to  our 
sense-perception  of  the  particular.  But  fuller  insight,  he 
considers,  was  not  far  from  him,  "  for  it  is  not  difficult  to 


248  GREEK   PHILOSOPHY 

see  that  his  conception  of  the  finite  world  makes  it  the 
necessary  correlate  of  his  conception  of  pure  self -conscious- 
ness, and  therefore  not  really  independent  of  it  or  separable 
from  it."  Like  Spinoza  he  holds  that  "  he  who  loves  God 
cannot  desire  that  God  should  love  him  in  return."  Thus 
he  tends  towards  something  like  dualism.  But  there  are 
passages,  he  says,  in  Aristotle  which  point  to  a  fuller 
meaning.  In  ithe  concluding  sentences  of  his  14th 
Lecture,  Dr.  Caird  makes  this  observation :  "  Indeed,  if 
we  were  allowed  to  take  such  glimpses  of  truth  as  if  they 
were  equivalent  to  a  clear  vision  of  all  that  is  involved  in 
them,  it  would  be  difficult  to  prove  that  there  has  been 
any  progress  in  philosophy,  or  even  in  human  thought ; 
or  that  the  latest  philosopher  has  gone  beyond  the  thoughts 
which  presented  themselves  to  the  first  men  who  reflected 
upon  their  own  nature,  and  upon  the  nature  of  the  Uni- 
verse." Here  Dr.  Caird  takes  a  view  which  goes  beyond 
that  of  Zeller  and  some  other  commentators  of  great 
authority.  But  his  book  is  so  admirable  that  I  have 
cited  it,  for  it  offers  an  interpretation  which,  while  caution 
is  enjoined,  teaches  us  to  read  Aristotle  free  from  the 
tendency  to  think  that,  because  the  Greeks  had  not  the 
orderly  view  of  experience  which  the  progress  of  subse- 
quent science  has  made  possible  for  us  moderns,  we  are 
therefore  to  read  them  as  though  the  great  problems  of 
reality  were  not  realised  by  them. 

With  this  word  of  reserve  it  may  be  said,  I  think,  truly 
that  a  great  lesson  which  Greek  philosophy  insisted  on 
remains  but  little  assimilated.  It  is  that  the  distinction 
between  percipient  and  perceived,  established  as  it  is  in 
knowledge,  is  the  work  of  knowledge  itself,  and  cannot  be 
examined  without  a  preliminary  inquiry  as  to  the  nature 
and  relation  to  the  entire  Universe  of  that  knowledge. 
Not  only  for  Aristotle,  but  for  the  great  schools  of  those 
under  the  influence  of  Greek  thought  who  came  after  him  at 
an  interval  of  four  centuries,  Plotinus  and  later  on  Proclus, 
it  seemed  impossible  to  assign  to  mind  any  position  except 
that  of  the  prius  of  things.  Whether  with  Aristotle  we 
call  this  prius  the  Active  Reason  or  with  Plotinus  the 
One,  the  point  remains  the  same.  Esse  is  Intelligi  only  if 
Intelligi  be  taken  to  mean  what  is  fundamental  in  experi- 
ence after  the  abstractions  arising  from  a  biological  idea 
of  the  self  have  been  eliminated  as  mere  derivatives  of 


THE    SPIRIT    OF    GREEK    PHILOSOPHY       249 

reflection.  It  is  because  of  the  rigour  of  this  elimination 
that  Greek  thought  seems  obscure  and  like  mysticism. 
And  yet  the  metaphysicians  of  Athens  and  of  the  later 
Neo-Platonic  schools  were  only  expressing  what  their 
close  reasoning  had  forced  on  them,  when  they  proclaimed 
the  apparently  first  to  be  truly  the  last,  and  reason  finally 
developed  to  be  the  foundation  of  the  apparently  causal 
process  in  the  scrutiny  of  which  reflection  had  dragged  the 
work  of  reason  to  light.  For  them  the  most  significant 
moment  in  the  real  was  the  universal,  brought  to  light  in 
abstract  form  by  the  activity  of  thought,  thought  which 
was  as  much  of  the  essence  of  the  object  as  it  was  of  the 
perceiving  mind.  The  modern  scientific  tendency  to  reduce 
all  conceptions  to  those  of  externality  and  cause  and 
substance  was  not  a  tendency  which  embarrassed  the 
Greek  spirit  in  the  way  in  which  it  embarrassed  the 
reflections  of  those  who  were  to  follow  up  its  working. 
The  distinction  between  subject  and  object  was  one  which 
for  thinkers  like  Aristotle  and  Plotinus  was  present  to 
their  minds.  But  it  was  a  distinction  falling  within 
knowledge,  and  the  reason  why  it  was  forced  on  knowledge 
they  found  in  their  respective  interpretations  of  the 
mind  of  man  as  conditioned  by  the  realisation  of  itself  in 
the  organism,  and  of  the  soul  as  the  entelechy  of  just  that 
organism.  If  we  may  call  them  idealists  at  all — and 
ordinary  realists  they  certainly  were  not — their  idealism 
was  of  a  distinctly  objective  type.  They  were  no  episte- 
mologists  who  sought  to  treat  perception  as  an  instru- 
ment through  which  an  independent  reality  was  reached. 
Perception  was  for  them  a  feature  of  an  entirety  within 
which  percipient  and  perceived  alike  fell,  and  in  which  the 
constitution  of  both,  with  the  apparent  antithesis  between 
them,  was  to  be  sought.  In  perception  the  mind  found 
what  was  of  its  own  character,  and  the  conditions  by 
which  it  was  limited  were  of  its  own  impesing. 

It  is  when  Aristotle  is  so  understood  that  we  cease  to 
be  surprised  at  finding  in  him,  as  something  naturally 
arising,  an  early  form  of  the  doctrine  of  degrees  in  know- 
ledge and  reality.  He  is  well  worth  study  in  this  con- 
nection to-day.  He  was  free  from  the  difficulties  which 
attend  modern  idealism  of  the  subjective  type  in  giving 
what  we  feel  to  be  its  due  to  the  actual  world.  But  that 
was  because  he  held  facts  to  have  their  foundation  not 


250  GREEK  PHILOSOPHY 

in  matter  but  in  form.  Experience  was  for  him  a  process 
of  progressive  interpretation  in  the  Becoming,  which  was  of 
its  essential  character.  He  had  inherited  from  Heraclitus 
the  belief  that  nothing  stands  still,  and  he  had  added 
that  all  that  is  exhibits  stages  in  development  from 
capacity  for  form  to  form  completed.  With  Goethe  in 
"  Eins  und  Alles,"  he  could  have  said  : 

"  Nur  scheinbar  steht's  Momenta  still, 
Das  Ew'ge  regt  sich  fort  in  Allen, 
Denn  alles  muss  in  Nichts  zerfallen, 
Wenn  es  im  Sein  beharren  will." 

The  highest  possible  form  was  for  Aristotle  the  First 
Mover,  the  activity  which  experience  reveals.  Its  nature 
was  to  be  that  which  alone  was  complete,  in  the  sense  of 
being  a  perfect  whole,  1/01)9.  Development  towards  the 
fulfilment  of  ends  was  the  process  of  existence,  a  process 
which  naturally  disclosed  stages.  All  other  sources  of 
activity,  the  causes  that  are  efficient  but  material,  he 
treats  as  falling  short  of  complete  reality,  and  subordinates 
to  final  causes.  Action  at  a  distance  presented  no  diffi- 
culty, because  the  Universe  was  for  him  ideal  throughout 
its  existence,  and  fashioned  and  operated  on  by  ends 
that  were  inherent  in  it.  What  he  speaks  of  as  the 
Active  Reason,  the  highest  and  final  form  of  creative 
activity  which  Reason  assumes  in  both  knowing  and 
being,  is  for  him  the  foundation  not  only  of  the  object- 
world,  but  of  the  Passive  Reason  that  appears  at  the 
stage  in  which  mind  is  confronted  by  objects  of  which  it 
is  percipient ;  and  for  Aristotle  experience  is  not  intelli- 
gible on  any  other  footing.  Even  if  we  look  at  the 
bare  facts  as  they  appear  to  the  psychologist  it  is  neces- 
sary, as  he  points  out,  to  pass  beyond  explanation  based 
on  the  separate  senses  alone.  It  is  not  enough,  he  says, 
in  the  case  of  sight,  the  sense  for  colour,  or  smell,  that 
for  odour,  to  take  account  merely  of  individual  qualities 
which  can  be  perceived  exclusively  by  the  senses  appro- 
priate to  them.  For  perception  is  more  than  a  matter 
of  the  outward  organ.  It  is  in  the  action  of  the  mind 
that  the  unification  of  the  results  is  to  be  sought  as  in  a 
common  faculty.  The  necessity  for  assuming  such  a 
faculty  is  for  Aristotle  obvious.  We  have  two  eyes  and 
two  ears  and  yet  see  and  hear  the  objects  of  these  senses 


THE    COMMON    SENSIBLES  251 

as  single  existences.  There  must  therefore  be  a  central 
instrument  of  sense,  in  distinction  from  the  special  organs, 
to  bring  together  the  separate  communications  and  to 
unite  them  in  the  individual  consciousness  in  perception. 
There  are  "  common  sensibles,  movement,  rest,  number, 
figure,  magnitude  ;  such  properties  being  peculiar  to  no 
one  single  sense,  but  shared  in  common  by  all  of  them. 
Movement,  for  instance,  is  perceived  at  once  by  touch 
and  by  sight  "  (De  Anima,  II,  vi,  3).  Again :  "  When 
we  reach  the  common  sensibles  we  find  we  have  a  common 
perception  of  them  which  enters  into  all  the  senses,  not  a 
perception  connected  with  some  single  sense  "  (ibid.  Ill, 
i,  7).  "  The  object  of  sense  is  in  fact,  at  the  moment 
when  it  is  perceived,  identical  with  the  actual  exercise  of 
sense  perception,  although  it  is  true  the  aspect  which  the 
former  presents  to  us  is  different  from  that  of  the  latter  " 
(ibid.  Ill,  ii,  4). 

Aristotle  seems  here  to  approach  the  standpoint,  not 
of  ordinary  realism  or  of  subjective  idealism,  but  of  an 
idealism  of  an  objective  character  in  which  the  mental 
and  the  non-mental  are  not  divorced,  and  subject  is  not 
treated  as  independent  of  object.  The  universal  is  not, 
as  with  Plato,  an  entity  apart  from  the  particular,  but  is 
present  as  inseparable  from  it  in  the  singular.  The  real 
is  individual,  and  the  mind  encounters  what  is  of  its  own 
nature  existing  in  the  object  of  perception.  He  does  not 
stop  at  this  point.  He  has  so  far  brought  knowledge  and 
its  object  into  a  common  medium,  for  all  knowledge  is 
concerned  with  the  universals  which  the  constitution  of 
experience  implies,  and  he  explains  how  this  is  possible. 
For  him  mind  and  its  object,  as  I  have  already  observed, 
are  not  two  things  apart  in  space  or  time,  with  the 
relation  between  them  regarded  as  causal.  He  rejects 
in  effect  the.  category  of  substance  in  this  connection. 
Knowledge  and  its  object  are,  as  the  words  I  have  quoted 
indicate,  identical  in  their  difference.  The  explanation 
he  places  in  the  foundation  which  he  attributes  to  all 
reality.  The  highest  principle,  that  which  underlies 
Becoming,  and  realises  itself  in  the  mind  that  knows,  is 
always  and  exclusively  vovs,  the  activity  of  thought  that 
thinks  itself  and  is  the  primum  mobile,  the  origin  of  all 
form  as  well  as  itself  the  perfection  of  form.  Matter  is 
thus  an  abstraction  made  by  and  within  mind,  and  is 


252  GREEK   PHILOSOPHY 

what  is  to  be  regarded  as  the  starting-point  in  an  intel- 
lectual process  which  extends  from  that  which  is  merely 
possible  to  the  completion  which  the  possible  presupposes 
as  the  foundation  of  its  very  meaning.  When  the  highest 
stage  is  reached  form  and  matter,  and  mind  and  its 
object,  are  at  one.  The  attainment  proceeds  by  degrees 
or  stages  which  cannot  be  represented  as  related  through 
a  mere  transition  in  time.  In  his  Metaphysics  (e.g.  Book  ix, 
chapter  8)  he  seems  to  indicate  that  he  holds  such  expres- 
sions as  "  cause  "  and  "  priority  "  to  be  ambiguous,  and 
that  actuality  is  to  be  looked  on  as  in  truth  prior  to  potency. 
He  explains  (Book  xii,  chapter  7)  that  "  thought 
thinks  itself  because  it  shares  the  nature  of  the  object  of 
thought ;  for  it  becomes  an  object  of  thought  in  coming 
into  contact  with  and  thinking  its  objects,  so  that  thought 
and  the  object  of  thought  are  the  same."  What  makes 
them  seem  to  us  different  is,  he  explains  in  the  concluding 
words  of  chapter  9,  that  the  stage  in  which  matter  is 
wholly  transcended  is  never  reached  in  human  life,  and 
that  objects  therefore  present  an  appearance  of  com- 
positeness  which  is  foreign  to  the  divine  thought  that  is 
foundational. 

I  have  referred  to  Aristotle  particularly  because, 
although  he  was  a  systematic  observer  of  nature,  the 
interpretation  he  offers  of  the  character  of  the  world 
within  and  without  our  finite  minds  was  but  little  embar- 
rassed by  difficulties  which  press  on  modern  men  of 
science.  Our  absorption  in  the  methods  of  physical 
science  has  led  to  great  advances  in  knowledge.  Experi- 
ment and  exact  observation  have  transformed  certain  of 
our  conceptions  of  truth  and  have  given  us  further  stand- 
points of  great  value.  But  we  have  paid  a  price  for  this. 
The  category  of  substance  has  become  unduly  dominant 
with  us.  It  has  created  a  tendency  to  regard  everything 
from  a  single  set  of  viewpoints,  and  to  reflect  as  though 
there  were  only  one  kind  or  level  in  thinking.  Aristotle 
suffered  from  the  want  of  our  exact  knowledge  in  his 
speculations  about  nature.  But  he  enjoyed  a  compen- 
sation. It  was  easier  for  him  to  realise  that  there  were 
more  aspects  involved  in  being  actual  than  only  one, 
and  to  accept  the  principle  that  knowledge  and  reality 
alike  exhibit  stages,  distinct  in  kind,  which  must  be 
estimated  by  applying  different  conceptions  and  different 


DIFFERENCES    IN    LEVELS    OF    KNOWLEDGE     253 

standards.  His  doctrine  of  final  causes  freed  him  from 
difficulty  in  accepting  what  was  in  the  nature  of  action 
at  a  distance.  The  form  of  final  cause  which  he  called 
"  entelechy "  was  conceived  by  him  as  of  a  character 
wholly  different  from  that  of  the  mechanical  relations  to 
which  the  followers  of  Bacon  were  later  on  to  confine 
themselves  almost  instinctively. 

But  despite  these  advantages  he  was  weighed  down  with 
difficulties  from  which  the  progress  of  observation  and 
experiment  has  freed  us.  To-day  the  world  is  assumed  to 
be  throughout  an  orderly  world.  The  more  searching 
our  investigations  the  more  thoroughly  have  they  elimin- 
ated apparent  gaps  in  the  sequences  of  mechanical  and 
biological  phenomena  alike.  The  sequences  may  be  of 
different  natures  and  may  exhibit  different  principles, 
according  as  they  are  sequences  in  mechanism  or  in  life, 
but  they  are  of  their  kind,  so  far  as  experience  carries 
us,  unbroken.  Uniformity  within  the  several  orders  of 
existence  seems  to  us  to  reign  in  nature  undisturbed  within 
each  order.  For  the  Greeks  this  was  not  clearly  so.  The 
range  of  their  special  sciences,  from  mathematics  through 
physics  to  biology,  was  very  limited.  There  were  gaps 
everywhere,  and  the  different  aspects  of  reality  were  not 
clearly  distinguished  or  ranged  under  the  conceptions 
appropriate  to  them.  The  consequences  were  what  we 
should  reckon  disorder  everywhere  in  the  procedure  of 
their  scientific  thought.  The  various  fields  of  observation 
overlap.  Metaphor  is  indulged  in  without  consciousness 
that  it  is  simply  metaphor.  The  philosophy  of  the 
Greeks  is  in  this  respect  difficult  to  interpret,  and  it  is 
still  more  difficult  to  be  sure  that  we  are  not  reading  into 
it  more  than  is  there.  But,  taking  Aristotle's  system  as 
a  whole,  there  are  certain  features  in  regard  to  which  there 
is  little  room  for  mistake.  For  him  it  is  clear  that  reality 
discloses  a  variety  of  stages,  rising  in  thought  from  the 
deficiency  of  form  which  he  called  matter  towards  the 
self-completing  form  which  is  the  ground  and  the  inspira- 
tion of  the  activity  of  the  whole  in  its  self-realisation. 
Becoming  is  for  him  of  a  meaning  deeper  and  further- 
reaching  than  any  of  evolution  in  time.  It  stands  for  the 
intelligible  process  by  which  thought,  transcending  while 
embracing  aspects  capable  of  presentation  in  time,  and 
progressively  grasping  itself  as  form  including  and  super- 
18 


254  GREEK  PHILOSOPHY 

seding  the  negative  relation  to  matter,  is  disclosed  to 
analysis  as  the  foundation  of  every  meaning  in  the 
universe,  and  of  all  that  is  actual  within  and  without. 
The  student  need  not  worry  himself  over  the  mythological 
images  which  Aristotle  is  fond  of  introducing  in  this  con- 
nection. It  was  the  fashion  of  his  age  to  resort  to  myths 
and  to  speak  in  what  were  in  these  days  the  popular 
modes  of  expression.  The  history  of  philosophy  must  be 
read,  like  that  of  literature,  with  reference  to  the  usages 
of  the  time  in  which  it  was  written.  Underlying  his 
language  in  all  its  forms  there  is  in  Aristotle  always  insis- 
tence on  that  ultimate  identity  of  thought  with  its  object, 
and  that  refusal  to  separate  them  in  kind,  which  are  what 
is  distinctive  in  his  standpoint.  It  is  the  human  limita- 
tions which  are  embodied  in  our  organism,  the  instrument 
which  the  reason  in  us  has  to  work  with,  and  which  is 
inseparable  from  self-consciousness  of  experience,  that 
prevent  us  from  holding  to  these  firmly  throughout.  And 
Aristotle  knows  this  and  tells  us  how  and  why  it  is  so.  The 
soul  is  indeed  the  entelechy  of  the  body,  and  therefore 
from  the  body  it  is  not  separable  in  fact.  It  is  the  reality 
of  that  body,  but  its  reality  at  a  different  and  more 
adequate  viewpoint  in  the  hierarchy  of  reason  than  that 
at  which  things  appear  only  as  operating  on  each  other 
in  space.  For  Aristotle  it  is  absurd  to  speak  of  the  soul 
as  moving  the  body  after  the  fashion  of  a  thing  acting  on 
another  thing. 

"  This  view,"  he  says,  "  is  held  by  Democritus,  whose 
words  rather  recall  the  saying  of  Philippus  the  comedian, 
that  Daedalus  made  his  wooden  Aphrodite  capable  of  move- 
ment by  pouring  quicksilver  into  her.  Democritus' 
explanation  is  in  truth  not  much  superior  to  this.  He 
tells  us  that  the  atomic  globules  contract  and  move  the 
whole  body  in  virtue  of  the  law  imposed  on  them  to 
remain  at  rest.  But,  we  should  ask,  are  these  same 
elements  to  produce  rest  also  ?  How  they  will  produce 
this  result  it  is  difficult  or  in  fact  impossible  to  say.  And 
indeed  generally,  apart  from  any  special  form  of  doctrine, 
the  soul,  so  far  as  we  can  see,  moves  the  body  not  in  this 
manner,  but  through  the  agency  of  purpose  or  thought." 
(De  Anima,  I,  iii,  9.) 

Aristotle  too  comes  well  in  sight  of,  what  he  indicates 


PRINCIPLE    OF    DEGREES    IN    ARISTOTLE    255 

with  less  precision  but  still  without  much  ambiguity,  a 
level  at  which  reason  does  not  distinguish  itself  from 
matter  by  giving  form  to  it,  and  at  which  it  does  not 
find  itself  conditioned  by  any  instrument  which  it  has  to 
use.  He  indicates  a  yet  higher  degree  in  the  order  of  the 
aspects  which  reality  implies,  an  intelligible  completion 
in  which  knowledge  is  the  same  as  actuality,  and  form 
and  matter  are  entirely  at  one.  This  is  the  degree  at  the 
level  of  which  knowledge  and  its  object  are  no  longer  in 
antithesis,  the  stage  at  which  thought  is  creative  in  that 
it  actually  thinks  itself,  and  encounters  nothing  but  itself 
in  its  object.  Human  knowledge,  conditioned  as  its  organ 
is  by  nature,  cannot  reach  this  degree  in  reality,  but  such 
thought  must  be  assumed  to  be  actual,  for  it  is  the  foun- 
dation in  terms  of  which  alone  the  actual  can  in  ultimate 
analysis  be  expressed. 

This  is  the  doctrine  of  Aristotle  as  I  read  him.  It  must 
be  taken  subject  to  the  reservations  of  Zeller  and  the 
words  of  caution  used  by  Caird.  But  the  interpretation  is 
substantially  that  put  on  it  by  several  other  commentators. 
Of  these  I  know  no  paraphrase  of  the  Aristotelian  position 
in  metaphysics  and  psychology  which  impresses  me  more 
than  that  which  occurs  in  the  little  volume  of  a  hundred 
and  fifty  pages,  written  as  long  ago  as  1837,  with  the 
title  Leib  und  Seele,  by  Professor  J.  E.  Erdmann  of  Halle, 
and  republished  in  1902  by  Professor  Bolland  of  Leyden. 
This  book  brings  out  the  principle  which  has  always  to 
be  borne  in  mind  by  the  reader  of  Greek  philosophy, 
that  it  is  not  by  looking  at  experience  as  consisting  in  a 
series  of  appearances  which  succeed  each  other  in  time, 
and  are  mainly  quantitatively  distinguished,  that  the 
facts  can  be  accounted  for,  but  only  by  recognising  ex- 
perience as  exhibiting  stages  in  the  quality  of  its  reality, 
stages  which  are  related  to  each  other,  not  causally,  but 
in  reflection. 

There  is  another  reservation  which  has  to  be  recorded 
at  this  point.  In  his  writings  on  logic,  as  commonly  so 
called,  Aristotle  says  a  good  many  things  that  are  difficult 
to  reconcile  with  the  main  current  of  his  metaphysics. 
The  discrepancies  can  hardly  be  explained  as  merely  due 
to  the  imperfect  form  in  which  the  text  has  come  down  to 
us.  In  his  theory  of  the  syllogism  he  speaks  as  though  the 
universals  with  which  thought  had  to  do  were  classes  simply 


256  GREEK   PHILOSOPHY 

as  wholes  of  extension.  This  idea  was  fastened  on  by 
the  Schoolmen,  and  it  culminated  in  the  doctrine  of  the 
quantification  of  the  predicate.  Small  wonder  that  the 
major  premise,  and  the  syllogistic  form,  or  what  is  called 
"  linear  inference  "  by  modern  logicians,  have  fallen  into 
some  disrepute.  We  need  not  be  surprised  that  a  genera- 
tion subsequent  to  Aristotle  should  have  declared  loudly 
that  ancient  philosophy  was  just  a  search  for  universals 
of  this  kind,  while  modern  science  was  a  search  for  causes. 
Still,  read  as  a  whole,  in  Aristotle's  teaching  it  is  quite  a 
different  principle  that  is  most  prominent,  the  principle, 
namely,  that  the  concern  of  knowledge  is  primarily  and 
inherently,  not  with  numerical  classes,  but  with  relations. 

As  I  have  already  observed,  Aristotle  has  no  monopoly 
of  a  principle  which  in  substance  he  was  the  first  really 
to  suggest.  Plotinus,  as  we  shall  see,  later  on  enounced 
it  quite  as  definitely,  and  in  modern  times  Hegel  worked 
it  out  elaborately.  In  our  own  days  Mr.  F.  H.  Bradley 
and  Professor  Bosanquet  have  made  the  doctrine  a 
familiar  one,  and  Professor  Pringle-Pattison  has  dwelt  on 
it  in  his  Gifford  Lectures.  I  will  quote  from  Mr.  Bradley 
a  single  passage,  and  with  the  quotation  I  will  close 
these  references  to  Aristotle,  making  only  this  brief 
comment.  One  has  to  be  careful  not  to  read  the  statement 
of  Mr.  Bradley  which  follows  as  to  the  principle  in  its 
modern  form  as  if  one  could  find  it  as  clearly  in  the  state- 
ments of  a  philosopher  who  wrote  more  than  two  thousand 
years  before.  But  Mr.  Bradley  had  himself,  as  he  has 
told  us,  inherited  his  doctrine  of  logical  stages  from  the 
idealism  which  culminated  in  Hegel  early  in  the  last 
century,  and  that  idealism  treated  its  own  doctrine  as 
derived  largely  from  Aristotle.  It  is  therefore  not  without 
authority  to  support  me  that  I  seek  to  connect  the  stand- 
point of  to-day  with  that  of  a  great  thinker  of  antiquity. 
Now  the  standpoint  of  to-day  is  expressed  in  Appearance 
and  Reality  (pp.  497,  498)  in  words  which  seem  to  me 
admirable. 

After  saying  that  for  metaphysics  all  appearances  have 
certain  degrees  of  reality,  and  that  metaphysics  can  assign 
a  meaning  to  perfection  and  progress,  Mr.  Bradley  adds  : 

"  If  it  were  to  accept  from  the  sciences  the  various 
kinds  of  natural  phenomena,  if  it  were  to  set  out  these 


MR.    BRADLEY'S    STATEMENT  257 

kinds  in  an  order  of  merit  and  rank,  if  it  could  point  out 
how  within  each  higher  grade  the  principle  of  the  lower 
grade  is  carried  out  in  the  higher,  metaphysics  surely 
would  have  contributed  to  the  interpretation  of  nature." 

And  a  little  later  : 

"  In  a  complete  philosophy  the  whole  world  of  appear- 
ance would  be  set  out  as  progress.  It  would  show  a 
development  of  principle,  though  not  a  succession  in  time. 
Every  sphere  of  experience  would  be  measured  by  the 
absolute  standard,  and  would  be  given  a  rank  answering 
to  its  own  relative  merits  and  defects.  On  this  scale  pure 
Spirit  would  mark  the  extreme  most  removed  from  lifeless 
nature.  And  at  each  rising  degree  of  this  scale  we  should 
find  more  of  the  first  character  with  less  of  the  second. 
The  ideal  of  spirit,  one  may  say,  is  directly  opposed  to 
mechanism.  Spirit  is  a  unity  of  the  manifold  in  which 
the  externality  of  the  manifold  has  utterly  ceased.  The 
universal  here  is  immanent  in  the  parts,  and  its  system 
does  not  lie  somewhere  outside  and  in  the  relations  between 
them.  It  is  above  the  relational  form,  and  has  realised 
it  in  a  higher  unity,  a  whole  in  which  there  is  no  division 
between  elements  and  laws.  The  sphere  of  dead 
mechanism  is  set  apart  by  an  act  of  abstraction,  and  in 
that  abstraction  alone  it  essentially  exists.  And,  on  the 
other  hand,  pure  spirit  is  not  realised  except  in  the 
Absolute." 

Five  centuries  after  Aristotle,  Neo-Platonism  became 
the  philosophy  of  the  Graeco-Roman  world.  Its  greatest 
figure  in  this  period  is  that  of  Plotinus,  who  was  born  in 
Egypt  but  finally  settled  in  Rome  and  taught  there.  He 
died  in  A.D.  270,  leaving  behind  him  the  materials  of  the 
fifty-four  books  of  his  Enneads,  which  Porphyry  edited. 

Apart  from  the  accounts  of  his  system  given  by  Zeller 
and  Caird,  we  possess  a  thoroughly  sympathetic  exposition 
of  his  teaching  in  two  admirable  volumes  published  by 
Dr.  Inge.  These  volumes  contain  the  fruits  of  much 
research,  and  they  supplement  the  excellent  work  done 
by  Mr.  Thomas  Whittaker,  from  a  somewhat  different 
standpoint,  in  his  book  on  the  Neo-Platonists.  Mr.  Stephen 
Mackenna  has  also  rendered  into  attractive  English  the 


258  GREEK  PHILOSOPHY 

nine  books  of  the  first  set  of  the  Enneads  and  the  Life 
of  Plotinus  written  by  Porphyry.  These  versions  of 
Plotinus  are  of  special  value  to  persons  like  myself,  because 
the  original  text  is  so  difficult  as  to  be  readily  accessible 
in  its  meaning  only  to  finished  scholars. 

I  will  first  of  all  indicate  very  briefly  the  doctrine  of 
Plotinus  in  outline.  He  was  deeply  influenced  by  Aristotle, 
whose  doctrine  of  the  relation  of  matter  to  form  his  own 
view  resembled.  Where  he  differed  most  from  him  was 
in  refusing  to  find  in  thought  conceived  as  thinking  itself 
an  adequate  expression  of  the  ultimate  foundation  of 
reality.  For  he  insisted  that  even  if  knowledge  is  con- 
ceived as  at  a  level  where  it  is  creative  of  its  object,  it 
yet  exhibits  as  implicit  a  distinction  from  the  object, 
which  imports  a  limit  not  the  less  actual  because  know- 
ledge itself  has  produced  it.  The  ultimate  foundation 
must  therefore  be  regarded  as  beyond  the  form  of  thought 
as  well  as  that  of  being,  and  as  an  unity  which  is  com- 
pletely self-contained  and  remains  within  itself.  It  is  the 
Absolute  One  and  the  Absolute  Good,  according  to  the 
point  of  view  from  which  it  is  approached  in  reflection. 

But  the  Absolute  so  conceived  is  not  to  be  described 
by  predicates,  even  to  the  extent  of  saying  that  it  is 
unity  or  that  it  is  good.  It  is  what  must  be  assumed  as 
foundational,  but  is  in  no  sense  substance.  It  has  no 
locality.  As  that  which  all  things  imply  and  on  which 
they  therefore  depend,  it  may  be  said  to  be  everywhere. 
But  as  it  is  itself  no  "  thing,"  it  can  have  no  spatial  relation 
to  anything  else,  and  is  therefore  nowhere.  It  is  not  a 
cause,  for  to  call  it  so  would  be  to  imply  a  time  relation. 
For  Plotinus,  as  for  Aristotle,  the  true  order  is  logical  and 
is  not  sequence  in  time.  The  higher  is  the  explanation  of 
the  lower,  and  not  the  lower  of  the  higher.  In  the  case 
of  the  human  body  there  is  separation  of  parts,  although 
there  is  unification  in  what  has  reached  even  this  stage 
only.  The  higher  form  of  this  unification  is  the  soul. 
But  souls,  although  they  have  much  in  common,  have  yet 
differences  which  mark  them  off  as  particular  souls.  There 
must  therefore  be  a  higher  stage,  that  of  the  general  soul. 
Still,  although  the  general  soul,  conceived  as  such,  is  the 
principle  of  life  and  motion  in  the  world,  that  world  is 
other  than  itself.  Matter  thus  limits  form  here.  A  higher 
aspect  is  therefore  that  of  mind  thinking  itself,  and  not 


PLOTINUS  259 

any  world  separate  from  it,  and  containing  all  forms  that 
are  actual  in  time  and  space.  But  even  at  this  point 
thought  distinguishes  itself  from  itself,  and  therefore  for 
Plotinus  it  has  not  attained  its  highest  possibility.  This 
is  the  absolute  unity,  the  One.  But  the  One  is  not  sub- 
stance and  it  is  not  static.  It  realises  itself  in  mind  and, 
through  mind,  in  the  objects  which  are  one  with  it.  Yet 
even  in  the  identity  with  its  object  in  which  mind  finds 
itself,  there  is  a  duality  between  thinking  and  being 
thought  which  is  indicative  of  a  degree  in  reality  lower 
than  that  of  the  One.  Mind  comprehends  all  that  is  in 
the  world.  It  is  in  mind  that  matter  becomes  actual. 
In  particular  all  ideas  belong  to  it,  whether  they  are  con- 
ceived in  separation,  as  Plato  conceived  them,  or  treated 
as  inherent  universals  after  the  fashion  of  Aristotle.  The 
relation  of  its  Ideas  to  mind  as  an  entirety  resembles, 
not  that  of  the  parts  of  a  spatial  whole,  but  rather  that  of 
the  principles  of  a  science  to  the  sum  of  knowledge  within 
which  they  are  embraced.  Because  the  world  of  space 
and  matter  stands  only  as  what  is  possible,  contrasted 
with  a  completion  which  is  actual,  it  is  in  the  supra- 
mundane  intellect  that  it  attains  reality.  That  intellect 
is  essentially  active  and  therefore  productive,  and  is  the 
source  of  the  appearance  of  differences.  The  One  is  many, 
not  by  local  situation,  but  in  virtue  of  the  intrinsic  differ- 
ences arising  from  the  intellectual  activity  which  belongs 
to  its  nature,  activity  which  operates,  as  Aristotle  had 
taught,  on  matter  which  is  the  indestructible  subject  of 
form. 

In  Plotinus  there  is  prominent  a  mystical  element.  The 
One  does  not  think,  for  it  is  completely  self-possessed, 
and  therefore  above  thought.  What  apprehends  it  must 
therefore  be,  not  thought,  which  proceeds  by  distinguish- 
ing, but  an  identification  of  itself  with  it  by  the  individual 
mind.  There  are  moments  in  the  history  of  the  individual 
self  when  the  vision  of  the  One  dawns  on  it.  In  these 
moments  it  seems  to  be  passively  receptive.  It  appre- 
hends in  an  attitude  which  is  different  from  that  of  know- 
ledge. Such  apprehension  is  not  really  a  vision,  for  the 
seer  is  not  distinguished  from  the  seen,  but  has  identified 
himself  with  it.  In  the  account  of  Plotinus  in  the  second 
edition  of  Mr.  Thomas  Whittaker's  Neo-Platonists  the 
author  sums  up  at  p.  103  the  practical  outcome  of  the 


260  GREEK  PHILOSOPHY 

doctrine.  "  While  here,  the  soul  cannot  retain  the  vision  ; 
but  it  can  retreat  to  it  in  alternation  with  the  life  of  know- 
ledge and  virtue  which  is  the  preparation  for  it."  "  And 
this  "  (in  the  words  which  conclude  the  Enneads  in  Por- 
phyry's redaction)  "  is  the  life  of  gods  and  of  godlike  and 
blessed  men,  a  deliverance  from  the  other  things  here,  a 
life  untroubled  by  the  pleasures  here,  a  flight  of  the  alone 
to  the  alone." 

Of  the  personality  of  Plotinus,  to  which  it  is  of  interest 
to  refer  as  influenced  by  the  atmosphere  in  which  he  taught, 
we  have  a  record  in  the  life  of  him  written  by  Porphyry. 
The  latter  says  "  that  he  seemed  ashamed  of  being  in  the 
body,  and  that  this  feeling  was  so  deeply  rooted  that  he 
never  could  be  induced  to  tell  of  his  ancestry,  his  parentage, 
or  his  birthplace."  He  would  not  allow  his  portrait  to 
be  painted,  asking  :  "  Is  it  not  enough  to  carry  about 
this  image  in  which  nature  has  enclosed  us  ?  Do  you 
really  think  I  must  also  consent  to  leave,  as  a  desirable 
spectacle  to  posterity,  an  image  of  the  image  ?  "  "  He 
abstained  from  the  use  of  the  bath,  contenting  himself 
with  a  daily  rubbing  down  at  home."  Porphyry  mentions 
that  Eustochius  had  given  him  an  account  of  the  death 
of  Plotinus.  He  came  to  him  from  Puteoli  and  arrived 
just  in  time.  When  he  did  so  Plotinus  said,  "  I  have 
been  a  long  time  waiting  for  you  ;  I  am  striving  to  give 
back  the  Divine  in  myself  to  the  Divine  in  the  All."  As 
he  spoke  a  snake  crept  under  the  bed  in  which  he  lay, 
and  slipped  into  a  hole  ;  at  the  same  moment  Plotinus 
died. 

It  was  to  Porphyry  that  Plotinus  entrusted  the  task  of 
revising  his  writings.  "  Such  revision  was  necessary," 
Porphyry  tells  us  ;  "  Plotinus  could  not  bear  to  go  back 
on  his  work  even  for  one  re-reading ;  and  indeed  the 
condition  of  his  sight  would  scarcely  allow  it ;  his  hand- 
writing was  slovenly ;  he  mis  joined  his  words  ;  he  cared 
nothing  about  spelling  ;  his  one  concern  was  for  the  idea." 
Apparently  he  inspired  such  confidence  in  his  wisdom 
and  integrity  that  a  good  many  people  left  their  children 
with  their  property  under  his  guardianship,  and  his  house 
was  filled  with  these  boys  and  girls.  "  He  always  found 
time  for  those  that  came  to  submit  returns  of  the  children's 
property,  and  he  looked  closely  to  the  accuracy  of  the 
accounts  :  "  Until  the  young  people  take  to  philosophy," 


THE    ENNEADS  261 

he  used  to  say,  "  their  fortunes  and  revenues  must  be 
kept  intact  for  them." 

Of  the  Enneads  there  were  six,  each  containing  nine  books. 
They  suggest  throughout  the  small  esteem  in  which  the 
author  held  the  phenomena  of  space  and  time.  Porphyry 
tells  us  that  one  Amelius,  being  scrupulous  in  observing 
the  day  of  the  new  moon  and  other  holy  days,  once  asked 
Plotinus  to  join  in  their  celebration.  Plotinus  replied  : 
"It  is  for  those  beings  to  come  to  me,  not  for  me  to  go 
to  them,"  an  observation  which  recalls  what  Heine  declares 
he  overheard  Hegel  say  when  vexed  by  hearing  the  vast- 
ness  of  the  firmament  extolled  :  "  The  stars,  the  stars ! 
what  are  they  but  a  brilliant  irruption  in  the  sky  ?  " 

It  was  the  opinion  of  Plotinus  that  "  we  rise  to  real 
being  as  that  from  which  we  originally  sprang.  We  think 
intelligible  objects  "  (he  says  in  the  Enneads,  vi,  5,  7),  "  and 
not  merely  their  images  or  impressions,  and,  in  thinking 
them,  we  are  identified  with  them.  Thus  we  participate 
in  true  knowledge,  being  made  one  with  its  objects,  not 
receiving  them  unto  ourselves,  but  rather  being  taken  up 
into  them.  And  the  same  is  the  case  with  other  souls 
as  with  our  own.  Hence,  if  we  are  in  unity  with  the 
intelligence,  we  are  in  unity  with  each  other,  and  so  we 
are  all  one."  Here  Plotinus  suggests  the  doctrine  of 
identity  in  the  thought  of  separate  persons  which  has 
already  been  discussed.  Such  individuals  are  for  him 
imperfect  manifestations  of  intelligence,  rendered  imperfect 
by  the  conditions  of  nature  and  of  finite  existence.  But 
thoughts  are  not  properly  events  in  space  and  time.  It 
is  only  for  special  purposes,  and  by  abstractions  such  as 
those  of  the  psychologist,  that  we  treat  them  as  such.  I 
need  not  refer  further  for  the  explanation  of  this  than  to 
what  I  have  already  said  in  earlier  chapters.  Like  Aristotle, 
Plotinus  looks  on  discursive  thought,  which  takes  things 
in  their  separation  and  connects  them  externally  to  each 
other,  as  a  limited  and  therefore  imperfect  manifestation 
of  mind  under  finite  conditions.  Such  thought  is  not, 
however,  a  property  of  the  organism  regarded  as  a  thing. 
It  characterises  the  higher  level  of  personality.  At  a 
still  higher  level  in  mind  the  barriers  that  divide  us  from 
objects  and  from  other  persons  would  vanish,  and  intelli- 
gence would  know  itself  in  its  object,  not  discursively  but 
directly.  We  should  thus  reach  self-consciousness  that 


262  GREEK  PHILOSOPHY 

knew  itself  and  recognised  itself  alone.  And  beyond  this, 
according  to  Plotinus,  there  is  a  yet  higher  level  or  degree 
at  which,  as  I  have  already  mentioned,  for  him  the  dis- 
tinction that  even  a  perfect  self-consciousness  makes 
within  itself  must  disappear  and  the  One  be  attained. 
But  to  reach  that  unity  we  must  transcend  self-conscious- 
ness and  become  as  nothing  in  order  to  find  all  in  God. 
Here  Plotinus  becomes  a  mystic.  He  cannot  express  in 
any  but  negative  propositions  what  he  strives  to  convey. 
"  When  the  soul  becomes  intelligence  it  possesses  and 
thinks  the  intelligible,  but  when  it  has  intuition  of  God  it 
abandons  everything  else,"  although  "  we  truly  come  to 
ourselves  only  as  we  lose  ourselves  in  Him."  This  is  for 
Plotinus  not  so  much  a  development  of  something  new 
as  a  recovery  of  what  is  lost.  For  his  method  is  to  explain 
from  above  downwards,  and  not  to  build  up  from  below. 
It  is  this  form  that  the  doctrine  of  degrees  in  reality  assumes 
with  him. 

One  feels  that  in  such  utterances  the  method  of  Plotinus, 
like  that  of  Aristotle,  was  hampered  by  the  traces  of  a 
tendency  towards  dualism  which  Aristotle  never  completely 
got  rid  of,  and  which  Plotinus  only  avoids  by  taking 
refuge  per  saltum  in  mysticism.  There  is  no  thorough- 
going attempt  to  relate  to  each  other  the  stages  in  know- 
ledge and  reality.  Although  mind  is  regarded  as  foun- 
dational  the  higher  levels  of  thinking  are  not  brought  into 
systematic  relation  with  those  below  them,  so  as  to  exhibit 
mind  in  nature  and  nature  in  mind,  and  their  apparent 
divergences  as  the  outcome  of  reflection  under  organic 
conditions.  Moreover,  the  artificial  form  of  the  Aristotelian 
logic  made  the  task  of  doing  so  more  difficult  than  it  might 
otherwise  have  been.  For  that  logic  treats  thought  as 
discursive  and  as  operating  formally  through  inherent 
separations  which  belong  essentially  to  judgments  of  the 
understanding.  As  a  consequence,  while  the  doctrine  of 
degrees  was  a  vital  one  in  their  systems,  we  do  not  find 
it  consistently  and  fully  developed  in  the  writings  Aristotle 
and  Plotinus  have  bequeathed  to  us. 

Aristotle  and  Plotinus  spoke  in  the  philosophical  dialect 
of  their  times.  It  is  not  our  dialect.  The  words  they 
used  often  suggest  ideas  about  matters  of  fact  which  have 
long  since  disappeared  under  the  scrutiny  of  exact  observa- 
tion. But  just  as  it  matters  little  to  the  student  of 


SCIENCE    AND    GREEK    PHILOSOPHY          263 

literature  whether  the  story  of  Hamlet  is  true,  so  the 
question  whether  Hellenist  philosophers  were  well  furnished 
with  accurate  scientific  knowledge  is  not  the  main  question. 
Philosophy  has  always  to  turn  to  science  for  material. 
It  cannot  interpret  with  full  usefulness  unless  it  is  in 
possession  of  the  real  and  exact  facts  to  be  interpreted. 
But  then  every  branch  of  the  sciences  has  its  own  principles 
and  its  own  outlook.  The  task  of  philosophy  is  to  ascer- 
tain how  far  each  science  embodies  standpoints  adequate 
to  the  whole  truth,  and  not  merely  to  abstract  and  partial 
aspects.  What  is  the  kind  of  knowledge  that  the  physicist 
can  offer  ?  His  details  may  be  never  so  right,  and  yet  he 
may  have  escaped  from  a  merely  partial  statement  of  truth 
not  so  much  as  has  his  metaphysical  predecessor  with 
details  throughout  erroneous.  It  is  the  character  of  the 
principles  applied  and  the  stage  in  knowledge  reached 
that  matter  here.  A  Tyndall  may  well  have  got  to  no 
higher  a  stage  in  this  connection  than  a  Lucretius.  The 
range  of  his  conceptions  may  have  been  no  wider  and  of 
no  higher  an  order.  The  penetrative  power  of  thought, 
itself  of  developing  capacity,  may  be  unlimited,  if  fully 
wielded.  But  the  hindrances  of  finite  nature,  the  con- 
fining character  of  the  brain  and  the  organism,  may  have 
prevented  him  who  tries  to  wield  that  power  from  develop- 
ing it  fully,  and  with  it  the  range  of  the  conceptions  of 
which  reflection  is  capable.  It  needs  a  larger  survey 
than  one  only  from  a  single  point  of  view  to  embrace  the 
whole  truth.  For  that  truth  makes  itself  manifest  in 
many  and  varying  degrees  of  reality.  It  is  neither  this 
nor  that.  It  reaches  over  their  distinction  and  character. 
We  have,  if  we  would  be  sure  that  we  are  not  confined  by 
trammels,  to  compare  standpoint  with  standpoint,  to 
study,  as  a  whole  and  in  their  relations,  the  various  phases 
through  which  the  history  of  thought  has  passed,  and  to 
read  the  great  writers  in  the  spirit  in  which  we  approach 
literature,  the  spirit  of  search  for  high  quality  in  conception. 
What,  indeed,  we  have  to  look  for  is  the  standard  of  this 
quality.  The  metaphors  may  be  those  of  a  past  age,  the 
science  may  be  so  obsolete  as  to  be  unworthy  of  the  name. 
And  yet,  in  the  insight  into  the  real  nature  of  the  problem 
of  reality,  and  in  the  comprehensiveness  of  the  answer 
offered,  we  may  have  a  solution  which  penetrates  more 
deeply  into  the  true  constitution  of  the  Universe  than  the 


264  GREEK  PHILOSOPHY 

partial  aspect  of  that  constitution  presented  in  the  work, 
more  accurate  in  observed  detail,  of  a  later  date,  not- 
withstanding that  it  has  been  done  with  far  more  command 
of  exact  facts. 

The  value  to  us  moderns  of  Greek  thought  is  that  the 
Greek  thinkers  recognised  that  no  view  was  sufficient  which 
excluded  any  important  degree  in  which  reality  and  the 
truth  about  it  could  be  presented.  Goethe  says  some- 
where that  the  test  of  poetry  is  size.  We  may  to-day  say 
the  same  thing  about  philosophy. 

Where  Hellenistic  reflection  remained  least  complete  was 
not  in  any  matter  of  detail  or  upon  its  theoretical  side.  It 
failed  to  hold  control  of  the  human  mind  because  it  was 
ethically  inadequate  in  the  scope  of  its  outlook.  It  did 
not  take  sufficient  account  of  the  infinite  value  belonging 
to  human  personality,  humble  as  well  as  great.  That 
was  where  it  laid  itself  open  to  the  criticism  of  Chris- 
tianity, a  criticism  which  subsequent  reflection  by  degrees 
assimilated  and  found  justified.  It  was  not  that  Hellenism 
had  wholly  failed  to  be  conscious  of  its  own  defects. 
Socrates  and  Plato  were  aware  of  what  had  to  be  added 
for  its  completion.  But  neither  they  nor  those  who  followed 
them  were  in  deep  enough  earnest  over  the  fundamental 
problem  of  ethics.  They  wavered  over  it,  and  they  gave 
place  to  those  who  did  not  waver. 

In  his  novel  The  Death  of  the  Gods,  Meres jowski  tells 
the  story  of  the  Emperor  Julian.  He  loved  Hellenism  in 
all  its  forms.  But  the  efforts  of  Julian  could  not  bring 
back  the  gods  of  Greece  to  life.  "  You  are  sick,"  cried 
to  him  Arsinoe  in  the  story,  "  you  are  all  too  weak  for 
your  wisdom.  That  is  your  penalty,  Hellenists  of  too 
late  a  day.  You  have  strength  neither  for  good  nor  for 
evil.  You  are  neither  day  nor  night,  nor  life  nor  death. 
Your  heart  wavers,  here  and  there.  You  have  left  one 
bank,  and  cannot  reach  the  other.  You  believe,  and  you 
do  not  believe.  You  betray  yourselves,  you  hesitate ; 
you  will  and  you  do  not  will,  because  you  do  not  know  on 
what  to  set  your  will.  They  alone  are  strong  who,  seeing 
one  truth,  are  blind  to  all  other.  They  will  conquer  us — 
us  who  are  wise  and  weak." 


CHAPTER    XII 

NEW   REALISM 

ONE  of  the  most  interesting  departures  in  speculation 
during  recent  years,  a  departure  in  its  own  way  as  striking 
by  its  influence  as  that  of  M.  Bergson,  has  been  the  move- 
ment initiated  by  the  various  schools  of  New  Realists. 
Since  the  commencement  of  the  twentieth  century  the 
disciples  of  these  schools  have  been  engaged,  both  here 
and  in  the  United  States,  hi  inquiries  of  a  far-reaching 
nature.  Turning  away  from  the  methods  of  their  pre- 
decessors, and  particularly  from  those  of  the  idealists, 
they  have  sought  to  bring  philosophy  into  close  relation 
with  science,  by  endeavouring  to  adopt  the  modes  of 
investigation  which  have  been  evolved  by  the  latter. 
They  claim  to  have  thus  placed  philosophical  inquiry  on 
a  sound  basis. 

Of  these  New  Realists  there  are,  as  I  have  indicated, 
several  schools,  diverging  from  each  other  rather  in  results 
than  in  methods  or  tendencies.  For  all  of  them  have 
this  in  common,  that  they  give  to  the  non-mental  world 
the  status  of  being  self-subsistent  and  completely  inde- 
pendent of  the  mind  of  the  observer.  Actual  objects  do 
not  for  them  exist  in  the  mind,  but  in  a  medium  that  is 
independent  of  mind.  Its  characteristic  feature  is  appar- 
ently taken  to  be  that  of  self-subsistent  space  and  time, 
or  of  their  union  in  a  foundational  space-time  continuum. 
For  space  and  time  may  prove  in  the  end  to  be  only  two 
inseparable  forms  of  a  general  and  self-subsisting  externality. 
Some  New  Realists  go  so  far  as  to  call  space-time  the 
final  substance  of  the  phenomena  of  experience.  But  the 
important  point  on  which  all  the  New  Realists  appear  to 
be  at  one  is  in  holding  that  things  exist  as  they  seem, 
and  that  to  interpret  them  as  not  existing  apart  from  our 
consciousness  of  them  is  absurd.  Even  mere  appearances, 

265 


266  NEW   REALISM 

if  it  be  legitimate  to  use  the  word,  are  non-mental.  As 
for  minds,  according  to  one  school  of  New  Realism,  if 
they  disappeared  from  the  universe  there  would  have 
disappeared  only  passive  awareness,  or  possibly  a  system 
of  "  conations,"  independent  of  which  our  sensations 
themselves  subsist  as  objects  in  a  non-mental  surrounding. 
According  to  another  school,  that  of  certain  prominent 
American  metaphysicians,  the  physiological  organism  is 
the  only  reliable  fact,  and  even  the  relation  of  awareness 
or  conation  is  nothing  with  a  character  apart  from  that 
of  its  objects,  but  appears  in  consciousness  only  as 
distinguished  or  grouped  in  a  special  fashion  by  the 
nervous  system,  in  contrast  with  other  objects.  For 
this  school  and  for  those  Behaviourists  who  are  associated 
with  it,  the  grouping,  but  only  the  grouping,  either 
depends  on  the  nervous  system,  or  else  is  simply  to  be 
accepted  as  a  fact  included  in  the  universe  like  any  other 
fact.  The  supposed  evidence  of  introspection  in  support 
of  a  peculiar  mental  activity  is  denied  altogether.  Seeing 
means  simply  colours  occurring;  hearing  means  sounds 
occurring ;  thinking  means  thoughts  occurring.  Mind 
is  just  a  casual  selection  out  of  the  objects  included  in  the 
field  of  consciousness,  and  has  no  characteristic  that  dis- 
tinguishes its  nature  from  that  of  the  other  object  sin  the  field. 
The  word  consciousness  is  a  merely  demonstrative  appella- 
tion. For  the  former  school  there  is  thus  an  approach 
to  dualism,  between  what  may  be  called  in  a  carefully 
limited  sense  subject-objects  and  mere  objects.  For  the 
latter  school  mind  is  nothing  distinguishable  from  any  of 
its  objects  ;  it  is  simply  a  set  of  objects  of  a  special  class. 
Even  when  we  are  in  error  there  is  an  object,  and  there 
is  no  justification  for  regarding  the  erroneously  conceived 
appearance  as  the  creation  of  a  mind  more  than  in  the 
case  of  any  other  object. 

Thus  objects  alone  really  exist,  and  what  we  call  con- 
sciousness is,  at  the  most,  a  name  for  certain  segments 
or  groups  of  these  objects.  Knowledge  is  indeed  often 
dependent  on  contiguity  and  succession.  Such  relations 
may  be  characteristic  of  the  groups  in  which  they  consist. 
But  to  say  this  is  to  say  something  not  free  from  ambiguity. 
It  does  not  really  imply  that  such  mental  relations  enter 
into  the  nature  of  the  object.  What  is  real  may  be  non- 
material,  inasmuch  as  it  may  stand  in  non-material  rela- 


RELATIONS    AS    EXTERNAL  267 

tions,  but  this  does  not  import  that  it  is  therefore  mental. 
The  object  is  always  different  from  its  apprehension.  We 
may  classify  it  as  material  or  non-material,  as  fact  or  as 
fiction,  as  concrete  or  as  abstract,  as  true  appearance  or 
as  untrue.  All  of  these  relationships  as  such  may  be 
objects,  and  in  so  far  as  they  are  they  exist  independently 
of  our  apprehension  of  them.  Thus  universals  and  rela- 
tions which  we  can  only  describe  in  terms  of  universals  are 
part  of  the  non-mental  reality. 

This  doctrine  is  of  course  remote  from  that  of  ordinary 
materialism.  It  does  not  deny  the  reality  of  the  relations 
or  universals  to  which  our  knowledge  guides  us,  and  which 
have  been  hitherto  assigned  to  its  domain  for  the  explana- 
tion of  their  genesis.  It  gives  these  relations  and  uni- 
versals, on  the  contrary,  a  high  place  in  actuality.  For  it 
declares  that  they  belong  to  the  substance  of  the  non- 
mental  world  and  are  independent  facts  in  it. 

As  is  to  be  expected  from  the  method  adopted,  what 
is  in  truth  the  conception  of  substance  is  really  implied 
as  the  everywhere  dominant  category  in  such  teaching. 
It  is  disguised  under  the  general  name  of  entity,  when  it 
is  applied  to  what  is  of  a  more  than  merely  sensational 
nature,  such  as  are  the  relations  in  which  sensations  are 
ordered  and  connected.  But  even  these  relations  are 
looked  on  as  self-subsisting,  as  static  and  self-contained 
realities,  and  to  them  the  conception  of  substance,  which 
is  applied  to  other  aspects  of  the  phenomena  of  experience, 
is  virtually  extended  likewise. 

I  shall  refer  in  the  pages  which  follow  to  what  seems 
to  me  to  be  the  real  significance  of  the  recent  movement 
in  philosophy  of  which  I  am  writing.  The  outcome  of  the 
new  doctrine  appears  to  be  that,  contrary  to  what  the 
idealists  teach,  the  world  of  our  experience  owes  to  mind 
little  or  even  nothing  of  its  constitution.  The  novelty  in 
point  of  form  of  this  latest  departure  in  philosophy  lies 
in  its  inclusion  of  relations  of  the  type  of  universals,  which 
were  before  considered  to  be  products  of  thought,  in  an 
object -world  which  is  pronounced  to  be  strictly  non-mental. 
In  so  including  universals  the  new  movement  brings  us 
back  to  what  bears  some  analogy  to  the  doctrine  which 
Plato  taught  more  than  two  thousand  years  ago.  But 
New  Realism  makes  its  point  much  more  definitely  than 
Platonism  did.  It  claims  to  have  laid  its  finger  on  a 


268  NEW   REALISM 

cardinal  fallacy  in  epistemology,  the  doctrine  according 
to  which  knowledge  is  the  property  of  a  mind,  and  yet 
actually  creative.  It  asserts  strenuously  that  the  mental 
act  of  perceiving  contributes  nothing  to  the  actual  exis- 
tence of  the  object  perceived.  What  we  feel  or  even  know 
is,  for  the  new  school,  not  only  real  and  independent,  but 
complete  in  itself  apart  from  the  work  of  the  mind  in 
apprehending  it.  The  object  of  thought,  according  to 
the  most  thoroughgoing  exponents  of  this  realism,  is  in 
its  nature  independent  of  any  act  of  thinking,  just  as 
much  as  what  is  felt  is  independent  of  feeling.  The  justi- 
fication of  this  is  put  forward  in  the  shape  of  a  systematic 
reconsideration  of  the  character  of  experience.  Such  a 
reconsideration  shows,  it  is  claimed  by  some  prominent 
New  Realists,  that  there  is  between  the  act  of  perception 
and  the  reality  that  is  perceived  nothing  intermediate  or 
purely  mental,  nor  anything  that  is  legitimately  to  be 
regarded  as  an  idea  or  presentation.  It  was  through  a 
mistake  under  this  head,  a  confusion  of  the  act  of  percep- 
tion with  the  idea  perceived,  that  Berkeley  thought  he 
had  arrived  at  subjective  idealism,  and  that  Hume 
developed  Berkeley's  result  into  scepticism.  It  was  the 
merit  of  Reid,  though  he  did  not  know  how  to  push  his 
discovery,  to  have  found  out  where  these  two  went  astray. 
By  the  New  Realists  generally  the  pretensions  set  up 
for  knowledge  by  the  idealists  are  reduced  to  very  modest 
dimensions.  Consciousness  itself  is  held  by  none  of  them 
to  amount  to  more  than  an  activity  or  conation  of  a  special 
kind,  capable  of  nothing  beyond  passive  reception,  and 
itself  developed  by  the  nervous  centres  of  the  brain.  Such 
activity  does  not  add  to  the  reality  which  confronts  it,  a 
reality  which  it  presupposes  and  with  which  it  is  corn- 
present  in  space  and  time.  Indeed,  the  fundamental 
relations  in  the  universe  are  really  relations  of  compresence 
in  space  and  time,  relations  which  belong  to  the  conscious 
and  the  unconscious  alike.  The  mind  which  contemplates 
the  fire  is  compresent  with  it  in  these  foundational  modes 
of  reality  in  exactly  the  same  fashion  as  is  the  armchair 
in  which  the  organism  is  sitting.  The  nature  of  the  mind 
which  perceives  both  the  fire  and  the  chair  is  that  of 
awareness,  an  activity,  as  is  subsequently  discovered,  of 
a  brain,  but  an  activity  that  is  not  constructive  but 
only  receptive.  It  is  a  process,  operating  as  a  factor 


COMPRESENCE  269 

in  a  self-subsisting  world  of  space  and  time,  of  apprehending 
by  way  of  sense  or  by  way  of  thought.  It  is  a  process 
that  is  moreover  aware  of  or,  as  is  said  by  Professor 
Alexander  and  his  followers,  "  enjoys  "  itself.  Into  the 
constitution  of  the  existence  of  what  it  apprehends  it  does 
not  enter  at  all.  It  is  simply  receptive  of  its  object,  and 
coexists  with  it  in  the  experienced  world,  the  relationships 
of  which  are  thus  more  fundamental  than  are  those  of 
knowledge.  Indeed,  knowledge  is  something  merely 
superinduced  on  the  compresence  of  the  brain  with  the 
fire.  That  compresence  is  foundational,  and  belongs  to 
the  chair  in  the  same  way  as  to  my  brain,  although  in  the 
case  of  the  chair  awareness,  in  which  consciousness 
consists,  has  not  been  superinduced. 

All  of  the  New  Realists  might  not  choose  these  expres- 
sions. But  some  have  used  them,  and  I  think  that  they 
fairly  describe  what  lies  at  the  foundation  of  the  general 
doctrine.  Later  on  I  shall  touch  on  other  aspects  of  this 
realism  of  the  twentieth  century.  But  even  a  bare 
outline  of  its  fundamental  doctrine  shows  its  main  point 
of  application.  Idealism  had  ousted  the  old  materialistic 
realism,  and,  by  analysing  the  existence  of  the  object- 
world  into  perception  or  thought,  had  reduced  matter  to 
mind.  Modern  Realism  rejects  the  analysis  and  the 
monistic  view  of  reality  which  it  entails,  and  affirms  that 
reality  is  through  and  through  extra-mental,  and,  as 
extra-mental,  fragmentary  or  at  least  pluralistic.  Even 
percepts  and  the  objects  of  thought,  which  have  been  in 
the  past  permitted  to  pass  muster  as  belonging  to  the 
territory  of  the  mental,  are  now  affirmed  to  lie  outside  it, 
and  to  exist  independently  of  each  other  and  of  the  activity 
of  the  intelligence  that  apprehends  them.  A  formidable 
barrier  is  thus  erected  across  what  Berkeley  and  Hume 
took  to  be  an  open  highway  to  subjective  idealism. 

This  is  an  impressive  position,  but  its  far-reaching 
character  is  not  its  only  notable  feature.  It  is  supported, 
as  no  philosophical  system  has  before  been  supported, 
with  a  claim  to  evidences  drawn  from  mathematics  and 
physical  science.  A  large  body  of  investigators,  here  and 
in  the  United  States,  are  busily  engaged  in  devising  new 
applications  of  its  principle  and  method,  applications 
which  are  based  on  mathematical  and  scientific  attain- 
ments in  some  cases  of  a  very  high  order.  The  philo- 

19 


270  NEW  REALISM 

sophical  magazines,  as  well  as  the  philosophical  books 
which  pour  out  of  the  Press,  testify  to  the  volume  and 
vitality  of  the  work  that  is  being  built  up  in  support  of 
the  new  doctrine.  Its  students  are  already  in  occupation 
of  an  extensive  field  in  current  philosophy,  and  they  are 
pursuing  their  subject  in  the  regions  of  exact  and  detailed 
knowledge  with  an  energy  that  has  had  but  few  parallels 
in  the  history  of  thought. 

The  appeal  made  is  a  good  illustration  of  the  method  by 
which  genuine  progress  takes  place  in  the  pursuit  of 
metaphysical  truth.  First  great  schools,  such  as  those 
of  the  Platonists  and  Aristotelians,  monopolise  the  atten- 
tion of  the  world  and  seem  to  have  established  a  claim 
to  finality  of  principle.  But  by  degrees  there  rises  up  a 
reaction  against  them,  such  as  that  of  the  days  of  Francis 
Bacon,  and  they  appear  to  have  been  permanently 
deserted.  This,  however,  proves  in  the  end  not  to  have 
happ'ened.  For  new  forms  of  idealism,  founded  largely 
on  the  results  originally  accomplished  by  Greek  thought, 
but  having  absorbed  the  apparently  negative  contribution 
to  such  knowledge  of  modern  science,  presently  occupy 
the  field.  They  claim  men's  attention  afresh,  and  for  a 
time  seem  to  have  displaced  all  else  in  the  estimation  of 
those  who  know.  But  when  the  generation  of  master 
minds  who  have  been  adapting  afresh  what  is  old  in  the 
new  forms  begins  to  pass  away,  these  forms  in  their  turn 
begin  to  seem  abstract  in  method  and  stale  in  outcome. 
There  then  sets  in  a  process  of  transformation,  apparently 
radical,  from  a  new  outlook,  based  mainly  on  the  posses- 
sion of  fresh  and  more  exact  knowledge  about  the  consti- 
tution of  reality  in  its  various  forms,  an  outlook  which  in 
its  turn  seems  always  destined  to  be  altered  from  a  stand- 
point apparently  fundamentally  different. 

But  the  differences  are  never,  so  far  as  the  history  of 
thought  in  the  past  is  a  guide,  so  fundamental  as  they 
appear  to  the  generation  in  which  they  first  emerge.  Pro- 
gress takes  place  by  oscillation  succeeding  oscillation  and 
reaction  following  on  reaction.  Every  great  controversy 
seems  as  if  predestined  to  end  in  a  larger  and  more  complete 
outlook,  in  which  the  best  that  has  gone  before  is  taken 
up  and  preserved,  and  there  is  no  reason  to  think  that 
the  new  and  great  controversy  which  modern  realism  has 
raised  will  not  work  out  analogously.  Nothing  but  good, 


PROGRESS    IN    PHILOSOPHY  271 

in  the  form  of  an  enlarged  view  of  some  of  the  character- 
istics of  reality,  is  likely  to  emerge  as  its  result. 

For  every  new  system  of  thought  that  is  worth  anything 
brings  with  it  fresh  and  deepened  conceptions  under  which 
to  interpret  the  universe.  Plato  and  Aristotle  accom- 
plished results  of  this  sort.  The  modern  idealists  did  the 
same  thing  in  a  fresh  fashion,  and  the  New  Realists  are 
apparently  working  with  a  similar  purpose  to-day,  when 
they  interpret  the  objective  world  as  containing  universals, 
thought  about,  no  doubt,  but  nevertheless  as  real  as  the 
particular  experience  given  to  knowledge  by  acquaintance 
through  sense.  The  reconceived  universals  may  or  may 
not  have  for  sense  a  separate  existence  apart  from  the 
particulars  which  they  hold  in  their  framework.  They 
may  prove  to  have  the  character  of  either  external  or  of 
internal  relations.  But  they  reveal  themselves  in  our 
experience  of  these  particulars  as  there  present  and 
confronting  us,  and  not  merely  as  added  by  reflection 
ab  extra.  It  is  for  these  relations  and  the  laws  to  be 
deduced  from  them  that  science  searches,  and  they  guide 
and  mould  all  the  searchings  of  science.  In  this  way  in 
a  new  philosophy  conceptions  selected  from  the  non- 
mental  environment  will  determine  the  subject-matter 
for  reflection,  which  always  finds  features  only  of  the 
character  for  which  it  has  adapted  itself  to  seek.  We  see 
this  in  the  case  of  the  new  school,  which  conceives  the 
object  of  consciousness  as  a  real  world  confronted  by 
another  thing  which  stands  passively  receptive  towards 
it.  We  see  the  same  influence  in  the  instance  of 
Bergson,  when  he  finds  himself  guided  by  observation  to 
the  existence  of  an  ultimate  and  creative  activity  of  life 
as  directly  disclosed  by  our  consciousness.  We  see  a 
similar  moulding  influence  exhibiting  itself  in  varying  forms 
in  the  systems  of  the  subjective  idealists,  such  as  Berkeley 
and  Hume,  and  in  the  later  and  different  systems  of  the 
German  idealists  and  their  followers.  But  we  are  apt  to 
place  the  oppositions  between  the  conceptions  of  the 
various  schools  too  high,  to  regard  them  as  though  they 
were  absolute  instead  of  merely  relative,  and  to  fail  to 
see  how  each  turns  out  to  be  just  in  the  end  a  correction 
of  what  has  gone  before  by  the  incorporation  of  a  negative, 
a  correction  which  is  itself  destined  to  be  similarly  qualified 
and  supplemented  later  on.  The  more  fundamental  and 


272  NEW  REALISM 

far-reaching  of  the  conceptions  which  dominate  tendencies 
in  this  fashion  we  call,  in  technical  language,  categories, 
and  we  come,  if  we  read  the  history  of  philosophy  aright, 
to  regard  it  as  a  history  of  the  criticism  of  categories. 

Now  the  moulding  power  of  categories  does,  as  we  have 
seen,  no  doubt  alter  for  us  in  a  remarkable  manner  our 
view  of  the  character  of  truth  and  reality.  It  even  appears, 
since  we  never  can  be  certain  of  finality  in  the  forms  of 
our  categories,  to  snatch  from  us  all  hope  of  finality  in 
our  attitude  towards  the  Universe.  Ought  this  to  dis- 
courage us  ?  The  recognition  of  it  does  not  discourage 
us  when  we  meet  it  elsewhere.  In  literature,  in  art,  and 
in  music,  where  the  representation,  however  much  drawn 
from  nature,  is  valuable  only  in  so  far  as  it  is  born  again 
of  the  mind  of  him  who  creates  it,  there  is  no  such  finality. 
Truth  and  reality  are  there  considered  to  lie  in  what  is 
finest  and  highest  in  the  quality  which  a  generation  has 
produced.  The  truth  never  stands  still.  It  is  always 
changing  its  form  as  our  categories  change.  Relativity 
thus  acquires  a  new  meaning  for  us. 

What  is  fundamental  and  essential  is  the  development 
of  fresh  results  of  utility  in  application.  For  the  sake  of 
this  progress  must  always  be  taking  place  in  the  correction 
and  evolution  of  our  conceptions.  To  the  searching 
criticism  of  these  conceptions,  whether  in  theoretical  or 
in  practical  life,  there  is  no  finality.  It  seems  that,  as 
was  in  the  end  discovered  by  Faust : 

"  He  alone  gains  and  keeps  his  life  and  freedom 
Who  daily  has  to  conquer  them  anew." 

Now  this  will  not  discourage  us  if  we  have  the  insight  to 
perceive  that  supposed  finality  must  be  actual  falsehood, 
whether  we  are  dealing  with  daily  affairs,  or  with  literature 
and  art,  or  with  philosophy  or  with  science.  It  is  not 
faith  in  final  truth  so  called,  because  for  us  human  beings 
there  is  no  such  thing  as  absolute  and  final  truth,  but 
the  quality  of  strenuousness  and  progress  in  the  search 
after  it  that  alone  can  give  us  a  sense  of  finality  attained 
in  which  we  can  rest. 

The  influence  on  all  our  knowledge  of  categories  as 
conceived  in  our  period  is  accordingly  a  factor  of  the  last 
importance,  and  it  is  to  categories  and  their  criticism  that 
we  must  see  closely  if  we  would  be  certain  of  the  only  kind 
of  progress  towards  what  is  real  that  it  is  worth  trying  to 


PROFESSOR    ALEXANDER  273 

make.  But  our  categories  do  not  merely  limit  our 
outlook.  Affirmatively  they  impart  to  it  new  definite- 
ness  and  penetration.  By  means  of  them  we  concentrate 
and  direct  mental  effort.  They  guide  us  in  the  reflective 
search  for  truth,  and,  as  far  as  their  light  can  reach,  show 
us  new  paths  along  which  to  pursue  it.  The  New  Realism, 
to  take  it  as  an  illustration,  is  stimulating  the  study  of 
logic  and  mathematics.  Whether  the  work  done  may 
hereafter  be  found  to  have  been  partial  and  unduly  abstract 
is  not  the  question.  The  point  is  the  advance  towards 
methods  by  which  problems  hitherto  insoluble  seem  to 
become  capable  of  solution. 

In  his  recent  Giff ord  Lectures,  so  far  as  they  are  concerned 
with  space  and  time  and  with  the  bearing  on  their  inter- 
pretation of  the  principles  of  New  Realism,  Professor 
Alexander,  in  two  closely  reasoned  volumes,  has  shown 
how  philosophy  may  seek  to  establish  organic  relations 
with  mathematical  and  physical  science.  The  Lectures 
contain  a  notable  attempt  to  accomplish  this,  and  are 
characterised  both  by  fairness  towards  those  who  differ 
from  him  and  by  great  general  knowledge.  He  discusses 
in  particular  the  mutual  implications  of  what  we  separate 
in  reflection  as  space  from  time,  and  he  tracks  back 
the  common  root  of  their  apparent  features  to  the  space- 
time  continuum  of  the  school  of  Einstein.  Into  the 
details  of  his  reasoning  I  have  not  room  to  enter.  But 
I  may  observe  that  he  regards  the  continuum  as  analogous 
in  its  character  to  that  of  motion,  and  sees  in  it  a 
foundation  for  the  reality,  not  only  of  space  and  time 
and  the  relations  in  them,  but  even  of  those  categories 
which  others,  like  Kant,  have  treated  as  forms  of 
mind  itself.  Whether,  therefore,  the  continuum  comes 
first  for  science,  or  knowledge  itself  must  come  first,  it  is 
necessary  to  ask  at  the  outset.  For  it  seems  to  me  that 
the  argument  of  Professor  Alexander,  by  reason  of  his 
loyalty  to  his  own  principle,  has  been  somewhat  deflected 
from  the  results  which  are  all  that  the  new  mathematico- 
physicists  have  really  produced. 

He  shows  that  space,  taken  in  abstraction  from  time, 
could  have  no  distinction  of  parts,  while  time,  taken  in 
abstraction  from  space,  would  yield  a  mere  "  now."  Apart 
from  space  there  would  be  no  connection  in  time,  mathe- 
matically considered.  A  real  continuum  therefore  implies 


274  NEW  REALISM 

both  factors,  for  without  a  temporal  element  there 
would  be  no  separate  points  to  connect.  There  is  no 
instant  of  time  apart  from  a  position  in  space,  and  no 
point  of  space  except  in  an  instant  of  time.  The  point 
occurs  at  an  instant,  and  the  instant  occupies  a  point. 
This  is  not  very  different  from  the  Bergsonian  analysis  of 
mathematical  time.  The  ultimate  stuff  of  the  Universe 
for  Professor  Alexander  must  therefore,  accepting  as  he 
does  the  principle  of  relativity  in  observation,  be  of  the 
character  of  point-instants,  and  it  is  so  that  we  get  at 
the  continuum.  The  correspondence  which  characterises 
it  is,  not  a  one-to-one,  but  a  many-to-one,  correspondence. 
For  one  point  may  occur  at  more  than  one  instant,  and 
one  instant  may,  analogously,  occupy  several  points.  He 
thinks  that  in  this  conclusion  he  is  in  full  accord  with 
Minkowski's  conception  of  an  absolute  world  of  four 
dimensions,  of  which  ordinary  geometry  omits  the  fourth, 
the  temporal  element.  According  to  the  general  principle 
of  relativity,  as  Einstein  has  since  expressed  it,  we  here 
reach  a  geodesic  line  to  which  is  relative  any  possible 
form  of  motion  and  acceleration  in  a  gravitational  field. 
The  form  of  the  differential  equation  describing  its  track 
must  therefore  be  such  as  to  be  applicable  whatever 
may  turn  out  to  be  the  character  of  the  co-ordinates 
of  reference  of  the  observer  of  motion  in  any  conceivable 
gravitational  field.  But  surely  this  result  imports  nothing 
short  of  relativity,  not  of  what  is  of  a  non-mental  character, 
but  of  what  is  so  for  intelligence.  Let  us  try  to  see 
whether  this  can  be  otherwise. 

I  begin  by  observing  that  there  seems  to  be  no  reason 
to  differ  from  those  who  insist  on  the  reality  of  the  con- 
tinuum. The  question  is  what  this  reality  means.  The 
continuum  may  be  taken  to  be  actually  there,  just  in  the 
same  sense  as  are  electrons.  We  cannot  directly  perceive 
either  one  or  the  other.  Conceivably  a  being  with  more 
highly  developed  organs  of  sense  might.  But  we  cannot, 
and  yet  we  say  that  we  know  the  continuum  and  the 
electrons  to  be  existent.  What  do  we  mean  by  this  ? 
Surely  that  we  interpret  the  phenomena  of  ordinary 
space  and  time  as  importing  reality  only  relatively,  that 
is  as  construed  from  a  standpoint  which  might  be  quite 
different,  to  an  extent  that  is  unlimited,  from  what  it  is. 
The  construction  from  that  standpoint  is  relative  to  the 


MENTAL    CHARACTER    AND    RELATIVITY      275 

particular  standpoint.  So  far  as  it  is  applied  to  what  we 
are  here  concerned  with,  forms  in  extension  and  their 
measurement,  it  is  a  purely  relative  one.  It  depends  on 
the  concepts  which  fashion  the  belief  that  gives  rise  to 
the  standpoint,  the  belief,  for  example,  that  I,  the  observer, 
have  axes  of  reference  of  a  particular  kind,  and  am  at 
rest  or  in  motion  as  the  case  may  be.  Under  the  influence 
of  this  belief  I,  the  observer,  relying  on  co-ordinates  of 
reference  which  may  vary  infinitely,  not  only  interpret 
but  experience  accordingly  lines,  measured  by  reference  to 
my  conditions,  as  straight  or  curved,  distances  as  greater 
or  smaller,  and  time  as  correspondingly  measured.  I 
grasp  that  all  this  has  come  to  me  from  interpretation  of 
the  actual,  and  not  through  direct  and  immediate  know- 
ledge of  it.  I  go  on  to  ask,  still  by  searching,  not  for  per- 
ceptions, but  for  systematically  drawn  inferences,  to  what 
I  am  to  ascribe  meaning  as  belonging  to  the  actual,  in 
the  sense  of  not  being  either  appearance  or  notion  relative 
only  to  some  particular  standpoint.  I  am  searching  for 
what  I  can  legitimately  conceive  as  true,  not  from  one 
standpoint  only,  but  from  any  standpoint,  an  existence 
that  can  in  consequence  have  its  meaning  only  through 
universals.  In  the  case  of  the  continuum  the  universals 
prove  to  be,  not  static  entities  of  a  non-mental  aspect, 
but  variables,  true  universals  of  mind  which  are  never 
inert  and  are  always  in  process  in  virtue  of  their  inherent 
nature  of  developing  new  relations.  That  seems  to  be 
the  necessary  result  of  being  in  earnest  with  Einstein's 
principle  of  the  equivalence  of  inertial  and  gravitational 
relations. 

In  order  to  see  that  this  is  so,  one  has  only  to  turn  to 
Einstein's  own  homely  illustrations.  I  will  take  one  of  these, 
only  slightly  adapting  its  descriptions  to  British  habits 
of  expression.  A  man  is  travelling  in  a  train  going  fifty 
miles  an  hour.  Having  finished  the  contents  of  a  bottle 
of  smooth  exterior,  such  as  the  wind  cannot  catch,  say  a 
ginger-beer  bottle,  he  opens  the  window,  and,  to  satisfy 
his  curiosity,  drops  it  on  to  the  line.  He  observes,  when 
he  stretches  out  his  head,  that  the  bottle  falls  in  what 
for  him  is  a  straight  line  perpendicular  to  the  ground, 
under  the  influence  of  gravitation.  As  the  other  inter- 
fering force,  inertial  motion,  is  common  to  the  bottle  and  to 
himself  in  the  train,  he  has  not  to  take  account  of  it.  The 


276  NEW   REALISM 

permanent  way  seems  to  be  running  from  under  the  train 
in  the  other  direction,  and  the  bottle  seems  to  fall  out  in 
a  nearly  perfectly  straight  line. 

But  to  an  indignant  plate-layer,  who  has  just  escaped 
its  impact,  and  who  happened  to  be  standing  at  the  side 
of  the  permanent  way,  the  bottle  appears  not  to  have 
dropped  in  a  straight  line  at  all,  but  to  have  flown  by 
him  in  a  parabolic  curve.  The  reason  of  the  difference 
is  that  the  plate-layer  applied  different  co-ordinates  of 
reference,  interpreting  himself  as  at  rest  on  the  embank- 
ment, while,  according  to  the  system  of  reference  of  the 
passenger  in  the  train,  he  and  the  train  looked  at  rest  and 
the  embankment  in  motion.  On  the  earth,  by  which  both 
systems  were  contained,  there  were  therefore  two  systems, 
one  relatively  at  rest  and  the  other  relatively  to  it  in 
rectilinear  motion,  which  could  be  rendered  into  each  other's 
terms  by  applying  the  formula  devised  for  the  Lorenz- 
Fitzgerald  contraction  hypothesis.  What  the  formula 
does,  unlike  the  old  Newtonian  formula  for  adjustment 
on  the  footing  that  the  permanent  way  and  the  plate- 
layer were  at  rest  in  an  absolute  space  and  time,  is  to 
provide  for  the  variation  and  consequent  relativity  of 
the  co-ordinates  used  in  each  case  for  expressing  the  space 
and  time  factors  in  the  equations,  and  for  rendering  them, 
while  of  different  mathematical  values,  equivalent  for 
purposes  of  mathematical  calculation.1 

But  an  infinity  of  such  variations  in  these  factors  is 
possible,  if  we  take  into  account  other  conceivable  stand- 
points of  observers.  To  a  man  in  the  sun  there  would 
be  one,  to  a  man  in  Saturn  another,  to  a  man  in  a  very 
distant  fixed  star  a  third,  and  so  on,  ad  inftnilum.  What 
Einstein  has  done,  by  applying  the  general  principle  of 
equivalence,  is  to  get  rid  of  the  idea  of  space  and  time 
as  independent  of  the  observer,  and  to  provide  a  method 
which  will  apply  to  all  or  any  of  the  forms  and  measure- 
ments which  for  him  depend  on  these  standpoints.  He 
treats  the  relations  in  the  continuum  alone  as  determining 
an  absolute  system  of  reference. 

1  It  makes  no  difference  to  the  truth  of  the  principle  that  its  applica- 
tion has  to  be  limited  by  those  exigencies  of  society,  which  compel  us  on 
the  earth  to  regulate  our  practice  by  conventional  co-ordinates.  A  police 
magistrate  would  therefore  deal  summarily  with  a  defence  by  the 
passenger  based  on  Einstein's  general  doctrine.  The  context  of  social 
experiences  requires  its  exclusion  from  everyday  affairs. 


RELATIVITY    AND    NEW    REALISM  277 

Now  it  is  only  conceptually  and  by  reference  to  the 
observer  that  he  can  do  this.  It  is  only  mediately  and 
by  inference,  for  there  is  no  direct  awareness  of  any  such 
continuum  or  of  such  relations  of  measurement.  They  are 
only  meanings  which  Einstein  discovers  in  nature  by  his 
mathematical  methods,  and  they  are  surely  analogous  to 
what  is  mental  in  character,  and  to  nothing  which  passive 
awareness  can  furnish.  Their  very  intrinsic  variability 
shows  this.  They  presuppose  knowledge  for  their  reality, 
and  it  is  not  knowledge  that  presupposes  them.  It  is 
only  the  forced  hypothesis  that  knowledge  is  a  causal 
relation  between  two  independently  existing  things  that 
gives  any  plausibility  to  a  different  idea.  Such  an  idea 
cannot  even  be  put  into  language  unless  such  a  causal 
hypostatisation  is  first  made.  Is,  then,  the  foundational 
fact  that  we  know  in  truth  of  a  conceptual  character  ? 
We  have  already  given  reasons  for  answering  that  question 
in  the  affirmative. 

As  has  already  repeatedly  been  said,  the  affirmation 
does  not  mean  that  thought  creates  things.  To 
conclude  that  it  means  anything  of  the  sort  is  again  to 
assume  tacitly  that  mind  is  a  thing  that  acts  causally 
and  the  world  a  different  thing  of  a  non-mental  nature. 
Now  Einstein's  doctrine  is  an  illustration  of  the  falsity 
of  the  assumption.  What  he  is  concerned  with  is  a  series 
of  meanings  which  possess  reality  and  veracity  only 
relatively  to  knowledge.  If  the  principle  of  relativity 
is  well-founded  the  very  basis  of  New  Realism  seems 
to  disappear  into  vapour.  None  the  less  the  strictest 
mathematical -physical  methods  remain  wholly  justifiable 
for  anyone  who  carefully  guards  himself  against  implica- 
tions that  take  him  beyond  the  limits  of  physical 
science ;  as  Professor  Whitehead,  for  example,  guards 
himself.  For  all  he  looks  for  is  the  meaning  of  reality 
from  the  point  of  view  of  science  as  strictly  confined  to  its 
own  domain.  To  the  window  theory  of  the  mind  he  is 
not  tied.  For  him  the  actual  is  not  put  into  the  dilemma 
of  either  coming  in  or  going  out  through  windows. 

I  cannot  therefore  but  feel  that  Professor  Alexander, 
despite  his  admirable  maxim  of  *  thorough,'  makes  too  great 
a  demand  on  our  credulity. 

Another  brilliant  exponent  of  the  doctrine  of  the  New 
Realist  school  in  philosophy  is  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell,  whose 


278  NEW  REALISM 

reputation  as  a  thinker,  and  particularly  as  a  mathema- 
tician, is  more  than  European.  He  claims  that  on  the 
basis  of  its  ability  to  treat  the  self-contained  character 
of  the  world  as  non-mental  and  as  including  universals, 
he  is  able  to  put  the  connection  of  logic  with  mathematics 
on  a  new  footing.  If  relations  are  not  merely  the  products 
of  thought,  but  confront  us  in  the  world  of  experience  as 
existent  there  not  less  truly  and  independently  of  our- 
selves than  the  particulars  of  sense,  then  the  work  of  logic 
must  be  to  investigate  these  relations.  Because  they  are 
extra-mental  entities,  notwithstanding  their  quality  of 
being  universals,  we  can  rely  on  their  validity  when,  by 
thought  and  experiment  directed  by  thought,  we  have 
discovered  them,  and  they  may  therefore  legitimately 
guide  us  in  forecasting  the  behaviour  of  the  particulars 
of  the  experience  in  which  they  are  embodied.  Thus  the 
problem  of  how  deductive  reasoning  can  give  us  more  in 
its  conclusions  than  was  contained  in  its  premises  appears 
in  a  new  light.  It  was  a  problem  which  was  insoluble 
only  if  we  assumed  that  general  principles  could  amount 
to  no  more  than  inductions  by  enumeration  from  the  whole 
of  the  particulars.  The  question  of  course  arises  whether 
the  result  reached  by  Mr.  Russell  is  a  monopoly  of  New 
Realism,  and  whether  it  has  not  been  already  attained 
from  a  different  point  of  view.  But  what  is  interesting 
is  that  the  outlook  of  Mr.  Russell  and  of  others  who  share 
his  metaphysical  views  has  directed  them  to  this  solution. 
In  the  hands  of  a  master  of  mathematical  method  like 
Mr.  Russell  himself  it  has  proved  very  fruitful.  For  it  has 
enabled  him  to  treat  mathematics  as  a  branch  of  his  new 
theory  of  logic.  In  this  way  he  extends  its  range  in  a 
fashion  in  which  it  was  difficult  to  extend  that  range 
while  mathematics  was  confined  for  its  subject-matter  to 
forms  in  space  and  time,  even  when  got  by  construction, 
and  had  no  proper  access  to  concepts.  For  if  there  is  a 
body  of  relations  in  the  world  of  objectivity  in  space  and 
time  which,  although  universals,  are  entities  existing  as 
independently  of  our  reflection  as  do  the  relations  in 
space  and  time  which  we  find  in  the  world  as  perceived  by 
the  senses,  there  is  no  inherent  reason  why  we  should 
exclude  the  former  from  the  subject-matter  of  mathematical 
method.  Indeed,  by  including  them  in  this  subject-matter 
it  is  claimed  that  much  advance  can  be  made. 


MR.    BERTRAND    RUSSELL  279 

Logical  forms,  according  to  the  view  to  which  I  am 
referring,  and  indeed  according  to  other  views,  comprise 
more  than  is  contained  in  the  mere  two-term  relations  of 
subject  and  predicate  in  the  judgment  of  formal  logic. 
They  are  the  foundation  of  general  truths  and  also  deter- 
mine the  structure  of  the  general  propositions  which 
express  these  truths.  They  are  even  more  significant  for 
the  modern  synoptic  logic,  which  dismisses  the  ordinary 
major  premise  as  a  useless  figment,  than  they  are  for  the 
older  syllogistic  logic.  The  business  of  mathematics  is 
with  certain  classes  of  such  general  truths,  and  its  object 
is,  like  the  object  of  every  kind  of  science,  to  rationalise 
the  confused  and  indistinct  perceptions  of  experience  by 
discovering  and  disentangling  the  implications  they  contain 
and  the  relations  which  govern  them,  implications  and 
relations  which,  though  universals,  may  be  actual  entities 
just  as  truly  as  the  percepts  themselves.  The  science  of 
mathematics  is  the  branch  of  logical  science  which  deals 
not  only  with  certain  of  the  relations  which  are  character- 
istic of  space  and  time  but  with  the  concepts  under  which 
they  fall,  and  which  guides  us  in,  among  other  things, 
making  ideal  constructions  in  space  and  time  symbolical 
of  these  concepts.  The  method  of  mathematics  is  largely 
deductive,  for,  when  a  concept  of  universal  application, 
being  a  real  entity  in  Plato's  sense,  has  been  discovered, 
we  can  frame  propositions  based  on  it  which  are  true  of 
all  the  particulars  which  experience  teaches  us  that  it 
governs,  in  so  far  as  they  are  seen  to  illustrate,  and  so 
belong  to  the  class  ascertained  by  the  concept.  Thus 
these  propositions  may  be  held  genuinely  to  extend  know- 
ledge when  we  apply  them. 

It  is  worth  while  even  for  a  layman  to  pause  at  this 
point,  and  to  try  to  appreciate  an  illustration  afforded 
by  the  treatment  of  mathematical  truth  from  the  stand- 
point of  the  New  Realism. 

The  definition  of  number  has  for  long  been  a  puzzle  to 
mathematicians.  To  limit  the  application  of  number  to 
what  can  be  counted  is  to  exclude  all  that  cannot  be 
counted,  such  as  are  transfinite  numbers.  It  might 
therefore  seem  natural  that  New  Realists  should  have 
sought  to  treat  the  word  number  as  descriptive  of  an 
actual  but  non-sensible  entity.  Mr.  Russell,  however, 
does  not  take  this  course.  He  thinks  that  while  number 


280  NEW  REALISM 

is  properly  predicable,  not  of  physical  things,  but  of  classes 
to  which  they  belong,  it  does  not  directly  represent  an 
actual  entity.  What  it  signifies  is  a  class,  but  a  class  of 
which  the  meaning  is  the  possession  by  its  members  of  a 
defining  property  in  virtue  of  which  they  belong  to  it. 
Number  is  not,  for  Mr.  Russell,  the  outcome  of  the  con- 
sciousness of  repetition  in  our  activity  in  counting.  It  is 
on  the  contrary  a  title  by  which  we  describe  the  class  to 
which  collections  of  things  belong  in  common  when  their 
members  stand  in  such  a  relation  that  each  member  in  one 
collection  has,  corresponding  to  it,  a  member  in  another 
collection.  It  is  the  possession  of  this  property  that 
makes  the  two  collections  similar  in  class  and  capable  of 
description  as  the  same  in  number.  Number  thus  refers, 
not  to  objects,  but  to  the  possession  by  a  collection  of  a 
property  which  relates  it  to  other  collections  in  such  a  way 
that  they  may  be  regarded  as  belonging  to  a  common 
class,  the  class  which  the  number,  which  may  or  may  not 
be  capable  of  being  ascertained  by  enumeration,  describes. 
In  this  sense  a  unity  is  asserted.  When  we  say  of  an 
infantry  battalion  that  the  number  of  its  rifles  is  one 
thousand,  and  is  the  same  as  the  number  of  the  privates 
who  serve  in  it,  we  mean  that  for  each  man  in  one  collection 
there  exists  a  rifle  in  the  other  collection,  and  that  the  two 
collections,  which  are  similar  by  this  one-to-one  corre- 
spondence of  their  members,  belong  to  the  class  which  has 
the  title  of  one  thousand.  It  is  the  relation  of  the  collec- 
tions and  their  one-to-one  correspondence  which  the 
number  indicates.  Even  if  we  cannot  ascertain  an 
arithmetical  number  of  the  members  it  contains,  the  class 
may  be  defined  algebraically  as  #,  and  we  can  reason 
about  x  as  the  indication  of  a  class  to  which  all  collections 
or  classes  that  are  similar  to  it  belong.  The  number  2,  on 
the  other  hand,  to  take  an  ordinary  arithmetical  example, 
is  the  class  of  all  couples,  and  3  is  the  class  of  all  triads. 
It  may  be  hastily  exclaimed  that  this,  while  true,  is 
artificial  and  abstract,  and  is  no  sufficient  reason  for 
rejecting  the  usual  way  of  regarding  numbers  as  properties 
of  things  as  distinguished  from  classes  and  from  general 
descriptions  or  characteristics  which  bring  the  subjects 
possessing  them  into  membership  of  classes.  But  the 
answer  given  is  that  it  is  the  very  abstraction  which  the 
method  makes  that  enables  it  to  disengage  the  conception 


NUMBER  281 

of  number  from  the  limitations  within  which  its  applica- 
tion is  confined  when  that  application  is  made  dependent 
on  the  presence  of  specific  objects  which  can  be  counted 
in  virtue  of  being  before  us.  In  what  are  called  infinite 
collections  the  members  of  the  class  are  not  all  before  us, 
and  never  can  be.  Yet,  although  a  series  is  unending,  we 
may  know  that  every  member  in  it  has  a  corresponding 
member  in  another  infinite  series,  and  vice  versa.  In 
such  a  case  we  can  find  an  algebraic  description,  applicable 
not  only  to  "  each,"  but  to  "  any,"  which  will  define  the 
entirety  of  the  series.  The  new  definition  can  in  point  of 
fact  be  applied  to  infinite  numbers  and  collections  as 
easily  as  to  those  that  are  finite.  For  this  method  it  is 
also  claimed  that  it  delivers  us  from  apparent  antinomies 
which  are  inevitable  with  ordinary  procedure.  The  old 
method  to  which  arithmetic  is  limited  because  of  its 
definitions  lands  it  in  insoluble  problems  and  also  at 
times  in  contradictions.  It  cannot  deal  with  transfinite 
numbers.  It  has,  again,  no  use  for  such  a  conception  as 
<V/2,  and  still  less  for  that  of  \/  —  2.  And  yet  in  other 
branches  of  mathematical  science  these  are  of  great  value. 
It  has  been  deflected  by  the  limitations  of  its  concepts, 
and  if  the  reasoning  of  the  most  modern  mathematicians 
has  accomplished  nothing  else  it  has  at  least  subjected 
these  concepts  to  a  salutary  criticism. 

It  has  been  said  that  if  a  mathematician  of  the  days 
of  ancient  Greece  were  to  come  to  life  again  to-day,  he 
would  be  astonished  at  what  would  seem  to  him  a  miracle, 
the  fact  that  even  the  children  in  the  modern  world  do 
sums  with  easy  facility  in  multiplication  and  division, 
which  would  have  been  beyond  the  arithmetical  faculty 
of  the  greatest  mathematician  of  antiquity.  The  explana- 
tion is  of  course  the  possession  of  the  Arabic  notation  and 
of  the  number  0,  possessions  which  have  enormously  en- 
larged our  arithmetical  capacity.  Now  it  may  well  be 
that,  just  as  this  advance  in  ideas  expanded  our  mathe- 
matical scope  in  a  large  class  of  operations,  so  the  new 
notions  which  have  been  introduced  by  logical  methods, 
based  on  the  assumption  of  the  reality  of  intelligible  rela- 
tions, may  greatly  extend  the  possibilities  of  mathematical 
operations.  People  were  held  back  in  the  first  case  by 
the  paucity  and  narrowness  of  current  conceptions,  and 
it  may  be  that  the  world  will  prove  to  have  been  similarly 


282  NEW  REALISM 

held  back  in  our  own  time.  Mr.  Russell  says  that  he 
required  the  metaphysics  of  the  New  Realism  for  his 
emancipation.  Whether  this  particular  metaphysic  was 
really  essential  for  his  mathematical  developments  may  be 
open  to  question.  But  the  doctrine  is  at  least  highly 
suggestive,  and  it  is  a  result  as  valuable  as  it  is  rare  when 
a  man  of  science  has  sought  to  present  his  system  as  a 
connected  whole  of  thought. 

Having  made  this  reference  to  Mr.  Russell's  mathe- 
matical logic,  and  to  its  value  in  his  hands,  I  must  none 
the  less  say  something  more.  In  one  of  his  latest  books, 
his  Introduction  to  Mathematical  Philosophy,  published  in 
1919,  he  explains  his  view  of  the  broad  principles  that 
underlie  an  earlier  and  much  more  detailed  treatise,  the 
Principia  Mathematica.  In  the  subsequent  book  he 
extends  his  basic  principle  freely  to  every  sort  of  process 
of  thought.  Among  the  most  important  of  the  chapters 
in  the  new  volume  are  the  fourteenth,  which  deals  with 
Incompatibility  and  the  Theory  of  Deduction,  and  the 
fifteenth,  which  is  devoted  to  what  he  calls  Prepositional 
Functions.  These  last  are  expressions  containing  one  or 
more  undetermined  constituents,  such  that,  when  definite 
values  are  assigned  to  them,  they  become  propositions. 
Such  a  function  is  therefore  itself  one  whose  values  are 
themselves  propositions.  The  assertion  in  its  case  is  not 
that  the  principle  invoked  applies  to  a  particular  instance, 
but  that  it  is  true  in  all  or  any  of  such  instances  if  it  can 
be  asserted  of  them  significantly.  A  common  property  is 
the  subject  of  a  prepositional  function,  which  means 
what  becomes  a  true  proposition  only  when  some  one  of 
its  objects  is  taken  as  the  value  of  the  variable.  "  If  A  is 
human,  A  is  mortal "  may  be  valid  as  a  statement,  whether 
A  is  human  or  not,  but  it  is  a  statement  of  a  functional  and 
not  a  prepositional  nature. 

With  the  aid  of  this  method  Mr.  Russell  proceeds  to 
lay  bare  certain  fallacies,  largely,  but  by  no  means  all, 
mathematical.  He  attributes  these  to  neglect  of  the 
above  distinction.  The  method  is  doubtless  a  really 
useful  one  for  certain  purposes,  useful  in  the  same  way  as 
is  that  of  the  psychologist  in  disentangling,  for  definite 
if  limited  purposes,  and  arranging  in  a  scheme  of  practical 
value,  the  phenomena  of  consciousness,  or  rather  certain  of 
their  aspects.  But  I  think  that,  just  as  in  the  case  of  the 


HOW    WE    REASON  283 

psychologist  there  are  always  latent  certain  distortions,  so 
in  Mr.  Russell's  thesis  there  is  implied  a  claim  to  insist 
that  thought  must  assume  a  form  which  may  well  be  one 
of  its  forms,  but  is  not  less  clearly  only  one  out  of  an  infinite 
variety.  Reflection  may  be  forced  into  such  a  form  in 
order  to  bring  it  to  the  test.  But  it  is  thereby  mangled. 

Mr.  Russell  says  that  he  means  by  a  proposition  primarily 
a  form  of  words  which  expresses  what  is  true  or  false. 
"  I  say  '  primarily,'  because  I  do  not  wish  to  exclude 
other  than  verbal  symbols,  or  even  mere  thoughts  if  they 
have  a  symbolic  character.  But  I  think  the  word  '  pro- 
position '  should  be  limited  to  what  may,  in  some  sense, 
be  called  '  symbols,'  and  further  to  such  symbols  as  give 
expression  to  truth  and  falsehood."  l 

Here  we  seem  to  find  the  root  of  the  matter.  In  mathe- 
matical reasoning  there  is,  because  of  the  character  of  the 
symbols  with  which  its  processes  are  concerned,  obvious 
justification  for  Mr.  Russell's  demand,  and  it  is  applicable, 
if  in  a  form  less  stringent,  from  certain  other  standpoints. 
Mr.  Russell  refers  us  to  the  Principia  Maihematica  for  a 
list  of  his  formal  principles  in  deduction.  These  are  such 
as  are  illustrated  in  processes  of  mathematical  reasoning. 
But  when,  as  he  apparently  does,  he  goes  on  in  the  recent 
book  to  suggest  that  the  account  given  is  adequate  for 
inference  of  every  type,  questions  at  once  arise.  In 
literature,  in  art,  in  religion,  do  we  reason  in  ways  like  this  ? 
Is  the  description  of  the  processes  of  thought  given  in  the 
chapters  referred  to  one  that  can  apply  to  thought  in  all 
its  forms  ?  Can  what  is  dynamically  f oundational  to  every 
possible  form  be  thus  put  into  a  strait-waistcoat  and 
rendered  static  ?  The  claim  seems  from  my  outlook  to 
be  much  too  narrowly  conceived.  I  am  well  aware  that 
the  conclusions  embodied  in  these  pages  are  such  that  I 
cannot  have  the  hope  of  securing  the  concurrence  in 
them  of  Mr.  Russell.  But  as  a  plain  person,  who  takes 
thought  just  as  he  seems  to  himself  to  find  it,  and  prefers 
to  let  it  pursue  what  seems  to  be  its  natural  life,  rather 
than  to  kill  and  dissect  it,  I  must  here  part  company  even 
with  one  for  whose  originality  and  acuteness  I  have  so 
deep  a  respect  as  I  entertain  in  the  case  of  Mr.  Russell.8 

1  Introduction  to  Mathematical  Philosophy,  p.   154. 

8  As  an  illustration  of  a  sort  of  human  reflection  in  the  pursuit  of  truth, 
at  the  other  extreme  from  the  sort  which  Mr.  Russell  seems  to  suggest 


284  NEW  REALISM 

If  the  suggestions  of  the  New  Realism  have  taken  root 
in  the  soil  of  pure  mathematics,  there  is  another  depart- 
ment of  science  where  they  ought  to  be  at  least  as  fertile. 
The  science  of  biology  appears  to  have  suffered  more  than 
any  other  from  limitation  in  categories.  The  majority 
of  those  who  follow  it  still  think  that  all  the  apparent 
relations  belonging  to  organic  life,  beyond  such  as  can 
be  expressed  in  terms  belonging  to  physics  and  chemistry, 
exist  only  in  the  mind  of  the  observer  and  have  no 
real  counterpart  in  the  objective  world.  When  driven 
to  concede  that  the  growth  of  a  cell  cannot  be  regarded 
by  the  observer  as  analogous  to  that  even  of  a  crystal, 
some  of  them  have  betaken  themselves  to  the  idea  of  a 
special  sort  of  energy  of  which  the  causal  action  explains 
the  phenomena  under  observation.  Sometimes  they  call 
what  they  thus  invoke  vital  force,  and  sometimes,  not 
very  accurately,  an  entelechy,  still  intending  by  the  latter 
term  to  describe  what  in  reality  exists  outside  the  material 
in  which  it  realises  itself,  and  is  thus  a  form  of  causal 
action.  More  often,  however,  biologists  have  simply 
ignored  the  crucial  question  of  what  conceptions  they 
ought  to  use,  and  have  contented  themselves  by  affirming 

as  the  true  type  for  our  thinking,  I  transcribe  the  passage  which  follows 
from  a  recent  book  by  a  great  American  critic  in  other  regions,  Mr.  Justice 
Wendell  Holmes's  Collected  Legal  Papers  (at  p.  180,  where  he  is  dealing 
with  the  "  Path  of  the  Law  ").  The  author  is  writing  about  the  method 
of  reasoning  requisite  when  the  aim  is  to  attain  to  truth  in  the  adminis- 
tration of  justice.  "  I  once  heard  a  very  eminent  judge  say  that  he 
never  let  a  decision  go  until  he  was  absolutely  sure  that  it  was  right. 
So  judicial  dissent  often  is  blamed,  as  if  it  meant  simply  that  one  side  or 
the  other  were  not  doing  their  sums  right,  and  that,  if  they  would  take 
more  trouble,  agreement  inevitably  would  come.  This  mode  of  thinking 
is  entirely  natural.  The  training  of  lawyers  is  a  training  in  logic.  The 
processes  of  analogy,  discrimination,  and  deduction  are  those  in  which 
they  are  most  at  home.  The  language  of  judicial  decision  is  mainly  the 
language  of  logic.  And  the  logical  method  and  form  flatter  that  longing 
for  certainty  and  for  repose  which  is  in  every  human  mind.  But  certainty 
generally  is  illusion,  and  repose  is  not  the  destiny  of  man.  Behind  the 
logical  form  lies  a  judgment  as  to  the  relative  worth  and  importance  of 
competing  legislative  grounds,  often  an  inarticulate  and  unconscious 
judgment,  it  is  true,  and  yet  the  very  root  and  nerve  of  the  whole  pro- 
ceeding. You  can  give  any  conclusion  a  logical  form.  You  always  can 
imply  a  condition  in  a  contract.  But  why  do  you  imply  it  ?  It  is  because 
of  some  belief  as  to  the  practice  of  the  community  or  a  class,  or  because 
of  some  opinion  as  to  policy,  or,  in  short,  because  of  some  attitude  of 
yours  upon  a  matter  not  capable  of  exact  quantitative  measurement,  and 
therefore  not  capable  of  founding  exact  logical  conclusions.  Such  matters 
really  are  battle-grounds  where  the  means  do  not  exist  for  determinations 
that  shall  be  good  for  all  time,  and  where  the  decision  can  do  no  more 
than  embody  the  preference  of  a  given  body  in  a  given  time  and  place." 


BIOLOGICAL    CATEGORIES  285 

that  the  methods  of  physics  and  chemistry  are  the  only 
methods  which  are  permissible  in  exact  science.  The 
consequence  of  such  attitudes  in  biological  research  is 
that  its  directions  are  profoundly  influenced.  There  are, 
of  course,  mechanical  and  chemical  processes  which  have 
to  be  studied  in  the  action  of  the  blood  corpuscles  or 
the  kidneys.  But  these  ought  not  to  be  assumed  to  be  the 
only  phenomena  which  concern  the  biologist,  or  even  the 
most  important  of  such  phenomena.  If  we  were  studying 
the  structure  and  activity  of  an  army  or  a  state,  or  if  we 
were  applying  ourselves  to  the  formulation  of  the  ethical 
or  juridical  principles  which  govern  the  action  of  a  com- 
munity, we  should  study  the  facts  which  experience 
presents  with  the  aid,  not  of  the  balance  or  the  measuring 
rod  or  the  clock,  but  of  standards  and  methods  and  con- 
ceptions of  quite  a  different  order  from  those  of  physical 
science.  We  should  recognise  that  the  phenomena  under 
investigation  required  ideas  analogous  to  those  we  derive 
from  the  experience  of  self-consciousness  and  of  intelligent 
purpose,  for  their  comprehension.  Now  why  is  this 
readily  admitted  to  be  so  in  the  study  of  human  society 
while  it  is  denied  in  the  study  of  the  human  body  ?  The 
answer  is  not  far  to  seek.  The  conventions  of  many 
biologists  do  not  allow  them  to  use,  except  provisionally, 
such  a  conception  as  that  of  end,  or  of  action  which  is 
quasi-purposive  in  that  it  consists  in  the  realisation  of  an 
end.  Use  them  provisionally  they  must,  for  facts  which 
embody  these  conceptions  stare  them  in  the  face.  The 
course  of  life  in  the  organism  which  conserves  and  main- 
tains itself  throughout  the  metabolism  to  which  its 
material  is  subjected  along  the  curve  of  the  career  from 
birth  to  the  death  that  is  necessary  in  the  interest  of  the 
species  ;  the  organic  development  which  results  from  the 
union  of  spermatozoa  and  ova,  and  the  phenomena  of 
heredity  which  this  development  exhibits  ;  these  things 
and  the  like  require  categories  higher  than  those  of 
mechanism  to  render  them  capable  even  of  expression. 
Yet  the  older-fashioned  biologists,  while  they  are  forced 
to  use  these  categories,  are  equally  forced  by  their  meta- 
physical assumptions  to  deny  them,  except  as  only  pro- 
visionally used  and  as  in  ultimate  analysis  untrue.  For 
their  philosophy  implies  that  no  relations  in  their  object- 
world  beyond  those  of  physics  and  chemistry  are  real. 
20 


286  NEW  REALISM 

Their  ambition  has  been  to  be  delivered  from  metaphysics, 
and  to  remain  with  feet  firmly  planted  on  the  rock  of  fact. 
But  this  rock  becomes  insecure  for  them  because  of  an 
assumption  which  for  all  they  know  may  be  metaphysical, 
the  assumption  that  the  relation  of  end  in  activity,  or  of 
a  whole  existing  only  in  the  parts  which  belong  to  it  and 
yet  dominating  their  behaviour,  cannot  be  a  fact  of 
extra-mental  existence.  Reality  is  by  such  would-be 
observers  strictly  confined  to  something  very  like  the  old 
supposed  primary  qualities,  and  they  forget  to  open  their 
day's  work  by  a  prayer  to  be  delivered  from  the  perils  of 
a  metaphysic  as  unconscious  as  it  is  out  of  date. 

Now  the  New  Realism  is  full  of  edification  for  this 
conventional  school  of  biologists.  Just  as  other  universals 
are  for  it  entities  belonging  to  physical  reality,  so  surely 
must  be  ends  and  the  relation  of  an  organic  whole  to  its 
parts.  The  New  Realists  may  well  inform  the  physiologist 
that  when  he  studies  the  exquisitely  delicate  and  quasi- 
purposive  operations  by  which  the  kidney  keeps  the  blood 
in  a  normal  condition,  or  by  which  the  blood  corpuscle 
itself  regulates  the  amount  of  oxygen  which  it  takes  up 
in  the  lungs  and  of  the  carbonic  acid  which  it  gives  off, 
or  by  which  the  living  organism  generally  devotes  its 
activity  to  the  maintenance  of  normal  conditions,  his  duty 
is  to  take  reality  as  he  finds  it,  and  not  to  deflect  and 
distort  his  observation  of  it  by  excluding  the  only  concep- 
tions of  his  facts  that  are  warranted  by  what  he  observes. 
We  are  all  of  us  confined  in  our  study  of  the  Universe  by 
the  limitations  which  the  narrowness  of  our  ideas  imposes 
on  our  observation.  Were  I  better  equipped  in  this 
respect  I  should  understand  the  world  more  fully  when  I 
walk  abroad  in  it,  an  observation  the  application  of  which 
I  do  not  restrict  to  my  talk  of  scientific  concepts.  Yet  I 
take  comfort  by  observing  that,  notwithstanding  a  certain 
superiority  in  realisation  of  things  around  which  the  dog 
who  accompanies  me  possesses  in  virtue  of  his  sense  of 
smell,  an  aeroplane  and  even  a  steam-engine  mean  nothing 
to  him.  Everything  is  relative  here  as  elsewhere. 

The  New  Realism,  therefore,  may  accomplish  much  by 
delivering  the  modern  physiologist  from  the  terror  of 
unknown  metaphysics,  and  from  the  interference  with 
his  freedom  to  observe  which  the  tendency  to  abjure  all 
but  certain  aspects  of  reality  has  brought  on  him. 


THE    DEFECT    OF    NEW    REALISM  287 

But  here  a  doubt  arises.  If  the  New  Realists  can  do 
so  much,  why  do  they  not  go  further  and  do  more  ?  They 
seem  at  times  to  lack  the  courage  of  their  convictions.  If 
the  categories  of  life  are  as  much  part  of  a  non-mental 
world  as  are  those  of  mechanism,  why  are  not  the  categories 
of  morals  and  beauty  and  religion  also  part  of  it  ?  The 
hesitation  which  is  sometimes  shown  in  giving  the  answer 
to  this  question  seerns  to  arise  from  the  circumstance  that 
if  it  is  so,  then  there  is  nothing  left  in  the  mental  world  at 
all,  hardly  even  the  activity  which  is  conscious  of  enjoying 
itself.  If  the  object- world  is  to  swallow  down  the  entire 
subject- world,  then  there  is  no  longer  any  need  for  dis- 
tinguishing between  non-mental  and  mental,  or  between 
matter  and  mind.  If  the  latter  is  absorbed  into  the 
former,  then  the  former  can  have  no  separate  existence. 
And  it  looks  as  though  it  were  only  by  an  abstraction  that 
they  have  been  separated  in  thought  and  distinguished, 
Separate  entities  they  can  hardly  really  be.  If  this  be 
so,  there  is  not  only  no  need  for  New  Realism  but  there 
is  no  room  for  it.  If  consistent  with  itself  and  resolute 
in  pushing  its  reasoning  to  the  inevitable  conclusion,  it 
may  chance  that  it  will  rind  that  it  has  decreed  its  own 
abolition.  This  is  a  point  which  must  be  noticed.  A 
serious  flaw  in  the  armour  of  a  system  is  found  if  it  turns 
out  that  it  proves  too  much.  The  question  which  arises 
is  therefore  how  it  has  come  about  that  the  New  Realists 
have  professed  to  draw  a  boundary- line  by  which  the 
region  of  the  non-mental  can  be  sharply  divided  from  that 
of  the  mental.  What  comes  again  to  memory  here  is 
that,  as  has  already  been  pointed  out,  existence  in  space 
and  time  is  for  them  foundationai  in  the  case  of  all  that 
is  real,  be  it  matter  or  be  it  mind.  For  if  consciousness  is 
an  activity  at  all  it  is  a  property  of  a  thing,  the  nervous 
system,  and  is  confronted  in  relations  of  extension  and 
succession  by  another  thing,  the  non-mental  world,  with 
its  entities  and  existences,  its  universals  and  particulars. 
The  dominating  conception  which  has  been  applied  to  the 
mind  is  that  of  the  thing  and  its  properties,  or,  in  other 
language,  the  category  of  substance.  But  is  this  category 
adequate  ?  If  it  turns  out  to  be  inadequate  quite  other 
relations  than  those  of  extension  and  succession  may  have 
to  be  brought  under  consideration,  if  the  facts  are  to  be 
capable  of  being  grasped.  For  it  may  turn  out  that,  in 


288  NEW  REALISM 

the  relation  from  which  we  never  get  away  in  our  experi- 
ence, the  object  is  not  a  thing  confronting  another  thing, 
but  arises  solely  by  distinction  made  within  knowledge 
which  is  really  indivisible,  and  which  appears  as  broken 
up  only  in  virtue  of  acts  of  abstraction  made  by  and 
within  itself.  If  so,  not  only  distinctions  made  in  terms 
of  space  and  time,  but  distinctions  made  between  the 
non-mental  and  mental  worlds,  may  prove  to  have  been 
incorrectly  interpreted,  and  they  may  disclose  themselves 
as  conceptions  of  abstraction  made  within  and  not 
without  mind  itself.  In  that  case  mind  and  not  exter- 
nality will  be  foundational  for  the  Universe. 

In  order  to  ascertain  more  definitely  the  significance 
of  the  question  thus  raised  it  is  essential  to  recall  the 
philosophical  ideas  against  which  the  New  Realism  was 
raised  up  in  protest.  For  it  seems  as  though  the  conflict 
were  in  reality  one  of  counter-abstraction  against  abstrac- 
tion, and  that  the  attacking  critics  have  taken  a  windmill 
to  be  a  giant.  What  do  we  really  mean  by  mind  ?  If, 
when  we  use  the  word,  we  are  thinking  of  a  thing,  or 
of  a  property  of  a  thing,  then  the  criticisms  of  the  New 
Realists  are  difficult  to  answer.  If  we  mean  what  is 
only  a  centre,  finite  in  time  and  space,  or  a  self  that 
belongs  to  no  order  in  reality  higher  than  that  of  the 
organism  in  which  it  expresses  itself,  the  New  Realists  have 
again  much  to  say.  The  mind  can  on  such  a  footing  be 
no  more  than  a  succession  of  states  of  the  consciousness  of 
something  observed,  either  by  itself  or  from  outside.  The 
ego-centric  predicament  arises  at  once,  the  predicament 
in  which  the  new  school  have  sought  to  place  subjective 
idealism.  But  if  mind  falls  also  within  orders  in  reality 
of  a  higher  character,  and  its  foundation  as  finite  has  to 
be  sought  in  a  self-completing  entirety  such  as  was  dis- 
cussed earlier,  then  its  nature  cannot  be  exhaustively 
described  in  terms  of  the  conceptions  which  the  New 
Realists  bring  to  bear  on  it.  Mind  can  on  that  footing 
only  assume  for  itself  a  finite  aspect  in  so  far  as  it  is  more 
than  finite.  The  distinction  between  itself  and  the  world 
that  confronts  it  is  one  that  thought  itself  has  made. 
There  is,  as  New  Realism  itself  asserts,  no  gulf  between 
the  mental  and  the  non-mental.  They  are  phases  in  a 
whole  within  which  they  both  fall,  phases  which  are  frag- 
ments only  because  of  the  standpoint  of  the  observer. 


THE    NON-MENTAL    WORLD  289 

What  is  the  character  of  that  whole  ?  It  seems  to  be 
such  that  within  its  terms  and  within  itself  all  that  in  any 
way  exists  must  fall.  It  is  activity,  but  not  the  activity 
of  anything  apart  from  itself,  or  one  which  operates  within 
forms  of  externality  that  have  meaning  only  in  its  terms. 
To  describe  knowledge  otherwise  is  surely  to  misconceive 
what  is  essential  in  its  nature. 

What,  then,  is  the  nature  of  mind  ?  If  New  Realism  is 
right,  it  is  either  a  group  of  things  or  an  attribute  or 
property  of  things.  Let  us  bring  this  theory  to  the  test 
by  looking  at  the  nature  of  the  non-mental  world  that  is 
supposed  to  exclude  mind  and  subsist  apart  from  it.  Its 
phenomena  are  not  static  but  dynamic,  and  they  are 
characterised  throughout  by  their  relativity.  If  we  accept 
this  far-reaching  principle  ex  animo,  do  we  realise  how 
profound  a  difference  it  must,  if  it  be  a  true  one,  make 
in  the  real  character  of  the  universe  we  observe  around 
us  ?  How  are  we  to  conceive  the  changes  in  that  universe  ? 
They  have  to  be  recognised  as  varying  with  the  mind  of 
the  observer.  Reality  itself  can  thus,  at  times  at  least, 
be  accurately  describable  only  in  terms  of  differential 
equations,  recording  relative  rates  of  change  for  the 
observer  and  in  the  reality  observed.  If  that  reality 
belongs  to  the  mental,  to  thought  as  distinguished  from 
non-mental  entities,  this  occasions  no  difficulty.  For  the 
characteristic  of  thought  is  always  to  be  continuously 
self-transforming.  That  is  its  dialectic,  its  negation  of 
the  relatively  static  character  of  what  is  taken  to  be 
external  to  it.  And  this  means  that  what  is  apparently 
external  to  it  never  is  really  so.  My  interpretation  of  my 
world,  and  the  meanings  I  attribute  to  it,  are  integral 
parts  of  that  world  as  it  seems  and  is  for  me.  This  is  not 
wholly  strange.  If  I  were  to  enter  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge,  in  company  with  my  dog  I  should  know  for 
certain  that  it  was  real  for  him  in  a  very  different  fashion 
from  its  reality  for  me.  For  him  it  would  be  mainly  a 
place  of  pleasing  odours  and  of  sensations  which  attracted 
him  much.  For  me  it  has  attractions  quite  other,  with 
which  many  associations  and  a  memorable  past  invest  it 
as  the  home  of  the  higher  mathematics.  For  my  dog,  who 
can  know  nothing  of  these  things,  this  aspect  of  what  is  for 
me  more  characteristic  of  its  reality  than  the  stone  walls 
does  not  exist.  And  so  for  a  disciple  of  Ptolemy,  or  even  of 


290  NEW  REALISM 

Newton,  the  starry  heavens  measured  and  placed  in  the  only 
fashion  which  Einstein  will  allow  us  to  recognise  in  them, 
as  existing  in  modes  relative  to  our  observation,  would 
be  there  hardly  more  than  the  real  Trinity  College,  as 
it  exists  for  man  in  its  full  significance,  is  for  the  dog. 
My  thought  as  the  individual  who  is  writing  this  does 
not  make  things,  but  that  is  very  different  from  saying 
that  thought  is  alien  to  the  constitution  of  the  universe 
and  does  not,  in  the  multitudinous  phases  in  which  we 
feel  and  know,  enter  into  the  very  essence  of  the  real 
universe. 

Mind  is  no  isolated  thing  ;  it  is  no  attribute  or  property 
of  a  thing.  It  is  the  self-creating,  self-contained,  and 
self -comprehending  activity  within  which  falls  and  renders 
itself  all  that  was,  is,  and  will  be.  It  is  the  self-developing 
interpretation  and  expansion  of  the  meanings  which  are 
its  own  creatures,  the  meanings  which  make  reality  what 
it  is,  whether  for  limited  purposes  we  distinguish  it  as 
what  we  call  non-mental  or  not.  It  is  never  concerned 
only  with  a  fragment,  or  confined  to  any  singulars  that  are 
exclusive.  That  is  because  it  is  always  in  one  aspect 
subject  which  takes  in  and  goes  beyond  its  object.  Its 
range  covers  always  the  entirety  of  the  universe,  an 
entirety  which,  potentially  or  actually,  in  reflection  if  not 
in  direct  experience,  is  within  that  range.  It  is  subject 
rather  than  substance,  for  substance  is  one  only  among 
the  categories  under  which  thought  creates  differences, 
while  to  call  it  subject  is  to  point  to  what  is  distinctive 
in  its  characteristics.  Even  as  conditioned  by  its  mode 
of  self-expression  in  the  intelligent  organism  which  marks 
off  the  finite  self,  that  self  is  yet  mind  with  this  inherent 
character,  and  has  as  its  essence  the  power  to  transcend 
limitations  which  have  meaning  and  therefore  reality  for 
thought  alone.  The  mind  starts  from  the  barest  sense  of 
the  contact  of  the  organism  with  another  substance.  It 
expands  its  sensations  into  a  whole  ordered  by  reflection 
in  simple  relations  of  externality.  This  whole  it  recognises 
as  one  which  by  its  very  nature  cannot  be  confined  within 
itself.  Fresh  feelings  and  fresh  relations  are  thus  recog- 
nised and  established,  relations,  it  may  be,  belonging  to 
a  higher  order  in  reflection.  Mind  thus  expands  its  world, 
and  in  expanding  it  knows  that  its  action  is  not  arbitrary, 
inasmuch  as  it  is  discovering  its  own  nature  and  finding 


CONCLUSION  OF  CHAPTER  291 

itself  in  what  appeared  external  to  and  independent  of  it, 
but  really  fell  within  an  entirety  which  was  no  other 
than  mind  itself,  which  is  thus  meeting  with  its  own 
activity  and  work  in  a  system  within  which  it  has,  to 
begin  with,  become  aware  of  itself  as  an  object  belonging 
to  the  entirety  thus  revealed  under  finite  conditions.  That 
is  how,  as  I  conceive  it,  the  individual  in  his  aspect  of 
finiteness  is  related  to  the  self  which  at  a  higher  degree 
of  reality  and  knowledge  is  nothing  short  of  mind  in  its 
full  and  infinite  character  ;  changed,  again  to  use  Brown- 
ing's words  : 

"Not  in  kind,  but  in  degree." 


CHAPTER    XIII 

REALISM   AND   IDEALISM 

IN  the  last  chapter  I  drew  attention  to  the  extent  to 
which  New  Realism  has  allowed  its  views  to  be  deflected 
by  the  notion  of  the  thing  and  its  property.  This  notion 
appeared  as  a  narrow  one,  but  of  a  potency  which  has 
given  rise  to  a  form  of  relativity,  an  antithesis  to  that  of 
subjective  idealism  but  based  on  the  same  idea  of  finality 
in  order  of  knowledge.  Into  the  story  of  the  genesis  of 
subjective  idealism  itself  it  is  not  necessary  to  go  here  in 
much  detail.  For  it  has  been  told  often  and  excellently, 
and  people  are  familiar  with  the  unconscious  assumptions 
made  by  John  Locke,  when  he  adopted  the  method  of 
"  looking  into  his  own  understanding  and  seeing  how  it 
wrought."  The  method  is  just  one  more  illustration  of 
how  a  metaphor  may  prove  a  real  snare  for  a  meta- 
physician. Locke  sought  to  trace  the  genesis  of  intelli- 
gence, on  the  footing  that  he  could  safely  represent  it  to 
himself  as  a  property  of  a  thinking  thing.  He  went  on  to 
explain  the  beginnings  of  that  intelligence  in  a  way  that 
assumed  it  to  be  already  present  in  its  completeness  ;  an 
instrument  that  was  really  from  the  start  taken  to  be  at 
the  disposition  of  the  mind  as  already  furnished  with 
it.  His  very  image  of  that  mind,  as  fully  equipped  but 
enclosed  in  a  human  body  and  confronted  by  something 
wholly  foreign  of  which  it  was  to  gain  experience,  in  truth 
begged  the  question  as  to  the  genesis  of  experience  that 
he  set  himself  to  solve.  For  it  is  only  in  terms  of  fully 
developed  knowledge  that  his  imagery  has  any  meaning. 
Locke  was  one  of  the  first  to  try  to  treat  knowledge 
systematically  as  though  it  could  be  regarded  as  an 
instrument,  separable  from  knower  and  known  alike,  and 
capable  of  being  laid  on  a  table  and  pulled  to  pieces.  He 
was,  in  other  words,  a  pioneer  in  what  is  called  in  our 

292 


LOCKE    AND    BERKELEY  293 

time  epistemology.  In  him  we  find  the  "  two-substance  " 
theory  in  all  its  nakedness,  with  knowledge  regarded 
apart  and  as  a  process  taking  place  between  the  substances. 
How  it  can  be  possible  to  go  behind  knowledge,  while 
taking  it  with  us  as  the  means  by  which  we  are  to  get 
behind  it,  is  a  question  that  does  not  occur  to  him.  And 
yet  the  metaphysician  who  forgets  it  falls  into  sin  against 
the  light  at  the  very  outset  of  his  pilgrimage.  It  is  lawful 
to  ignore  this  question  only  for  the  special  purpose  of 
being  able  to  concentrate  on  a  view  of  knowledge  that  is 
never  meant  to  be  more  than  relative.  The  mathematician 
and  the  physicist  are  typical  users  of  the  method  of 
externalisation.  But  their  object  is  not  to  get  at  the 
ultimate  meaning  of  reality.  It  is  an  object  of  a  much 
more  limited  kind,  appropriate  only  to  an  outlook  that 
is  deliberately  restricted.  The  view  so  attained  can  yield 
only  results  that  are  never  more  than  relatively  complete, 
and  it  depends  on  restricted  conceptions  adopted  in  order 
to  obtain  precision  in  only  a  special  kind  of  inquiry. 

If  Berkeley  destroyed  certain  of  the  superstitions  of 
Locke  when  he  discovered  that  it  was  wrong  to  speak  of 
ideas  as  resembling  non-ideal  objects,  his  doctrine  was 
none  the  less  itself  shortly  afterwards  forced  by  Hume 
down  a  slippery  slope  on  which  it  was  impossible  to  stop. 
Dissociating  himself  from  his  predecessor's  view  about 
ideas,  Berkeley  had  still,  in  effect,  applied  the  notion  of 
substance  to  the  mind  and  to  God,  both  being  required 
under  this  aspect  for  the  application  of  his  own  principles. 
He  treated  experience  as  what  could  be  broken  into  bits, 
existing  apart  from  the  significance  which  their  mutual 
relations  gave  them,  instead  of  as  a  whole  which  must  be 
left  in  its  integrity.  Hume  had  in  consequence  an  easy 
victory  over  him.  There  was  no  foothold  on  this  slope. 
Spiritual  substances  and  causation  disappeared  alike 
under  the  application  of  the  analysis  which  Berkeley  had 
himself  applied  to  material  substances.  There  was  nothing 
left  which  could  justify  us,  on  this  footing,  in  assuming 
that  we  could  find  more  present  than  merely  particular 
experiences  or  impressions  along  with  expectations,  scienti- 
fically unjustifiable,  of  their  repetition,  expectations  which 
habit,  derived  from  what  we  had  chanced  to  find  in  the 
past,  excited  in  us.  What  answer  could  be  given  to  the 
question  which  must  be  put  about  every  idea  we  had, 


294  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

whether  of  substance  or  of  cause  or  of  expectation, 
"  From  what  impression  is  the  supposed  idea  derived  ?  It 
is  only  an  additional  force  and  vivacity  that  distinguishes 
the  ideas  of  the  judgment  from  the  fictions  of  the  imagina- 
tion." Belief  is  from  this  point  of  view  a  matter  of 
purely  subjective  feeling,  and  not  of  rational  insight,  as 
Berkeley  thought.  "  'Tis  not  solely  in  poetry  and  music," 
said  Hume,  "  we  must  follow  our  taste  and  sentiments, 
but  likewise  in  philosophy."  When  I  am  convinced  of 
my  principle,  "  'tis  only  an  idea  which  strikes  more 
strongly  upon  me.  When  I  give  the  preference  to  one 
set  of  arguments  above  another  I  do  nothing  but  decide 
from  my  feeling  concerning  the  superiority  of  their 
influence.  Objects  have  no  discoverable  connexion 
together ;  nor  is  it  from  any  other  principle  than  custom 
operating  on  the  imagination  that  we  can  draw  any 
inference  from  the  appearance  of  one  to  the  existence  of 
the  other."  So  with  our  "  opinion  of  the  continued 
existence  of  body,"  or  our  thinking  that  what  appears  as 
constantly  repeated  is  the  same  as  numerical  identity, 
for  we  "  disguise,  as  much  as  possible,  the  interruption, 
or  rather  remove  it  entirely,  by  supposing  that  these 
interrupted  perceptions  are  connected  by  a  real  existence 
of  which  we  are  insensible."  "  It  is  thus,  too,  that  we 
come  to  the  hypothesis  of  the  double  existence  of  percep- 
tion and  objects  ;  which  pleases  our  reason,  in  allowing 
that  our  dependent  perceptions  are  interrupted  and 
different ;  and  at  the  same  time  is  agreeable  to  the  imagina- 
tion, in  attributing  a  continued  existence  to  something 
else,  which  we  call  objects.  This  is,  however,  but  '  a  new 
fiction  ' ;  only  a  palliative  remedy  which  contains  all  the 
difficulties  of  the  vulgar  system,  with  some  others  that 
are  peculiar  to  itself." 

The  story  thus  told  in  its  bare  outline  shows  how  the 
notion  of  mind  as  a  "  thing  "  impelled  Locke  down  a  path 
on  which  he  could  not  stop,  and  down  which  Berkeley  was 
impelled  by  it  still  further.  It  was  reserved  for  Hume 
to  conduct  philosophy  yet  nearer  to  the  termination  of 
this  path  in  a  precipice.  The  path  selected  by  these  three 
thinkers  was  that  indicated  by  the  signpost  which  pre- 
scribed the  way  as  being  to  treat  mind  as  substance,  and 
Hume  finally  penetrated  along  this  way  until  he  came  to 
a  point  where  substance  and  mind  with  it  disappeared 


THOMAS    REID  295 

into  the  void.  Then  came  on  the  scene  Reid  and  Kant, 
the  respective  founders  of  two  schools  of  philosophy  in 
both  of  which  it  was  insisted  that  the  steps  taken  must 
be  retraced  and  a  return  made  at  any  rate  some  way 
back  towards  the  starting-point.  The  first  of  these  schools 
was  that  founded  by  Thomas  Reid.  He  was  a  man  well 
worthy  of  admiration,  though  he  has  been  much  forgotten. 
In  certain  points  he  anticipated  what  was  to  come  more 
than  a  century  later  from  the  New  Realists.  Like  them  he 
entered  at  the  beginning  on  the  pathway  which  Locke 
had  chosen,  in  the  belief  that  it  would  lead,  not  to  a 
precipice,  but  to  reality.  He,  too,  contemplated  knowledge 
as  an  attribute  or  relation  belonging  to  something  which 
he  called  the  mind.  But  he  refused  to  go  further,  and  to 
follow  Locke  in  taking  the  immediate  objects  of  the  mind 
to  be  mere  ideas.  He  saw  that  to  do  so  could  only  lead 
to  the  disaster  with  which  Hume  had  threatened 
philosophy.  He,  therefore,  like  the  New  Realists,  rejected 
the  doctrine  which  was  to  become  that  of  representative 
perception.  He  thought  that  what  was  really  perceived 
was,  not  an  idea,  but  a  fact,  outside  of  and  external  to 
the  mind  that  perceived  it.  He  refused  to  concede  to 
Locke  and  Berkeley  the  reality  of  either  an  intermediate 
or  even  a  purely  mental  idea  or  presentation.  Existence 
outside  the  mind  was  known  directly,  and  such  existence 
went  on,  whether  or  not  there  were  windows  in  the  mind 
through  which  we  became  aware  of  it. 

Speaking  of  Hume,  for  whose  insight  he  had  a  profound 
respect,  he  says  this  : 

"  For  my  own  satisfaction  I  entered  into  a  serious 
examination  of  the  principles  upon  which  this  sceptical 
system  is  built ;  and  was  not  a  little  surprised  to  find  that 
it  leans  with  its  whole  weight  upon  an  hypothesis  which 
is  ancient  indeed,  and  hath  been  very  generally  received 
by  philosophers,  but  of  which  I  can  find  no  solid  proof. 
The  hypothesis  I  mean  is  that  nothing  is  perceived  but 
what  is  in  the  mind  that  perceives  it — that  we  do  not 
really  perceive  things  that  are  external,  but  only  certain 
images  and  pictures  of  them  imprinted  upon  the  mind, 
which  are  called  '  impressions  '  and  '  ideas,'  ...  I  thought 
it  unreasonable,  upon  the  authority  of  philosophers,  to 
admit  an  hypothesis  which,  in  my  opinion,  overturns  all 


296  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

philosophy,  all  religion  and  virtue,  and  all  common  sense, 
.  .  .  and  I  resolved  to  enquire  into  this  subject  anew  with- 
out regard  to  any  hypothesis."  l 

When  Reid  speaks,  as  he  goes  on  to  do,  of  "  common 
sense  "  as  guiding  him,  he  means,  not  the  vague  view  of 
the  man  in  the  street,  but  what  he  calls  "  the  first  degree 
of  reason,"  having  for  its  object  to  judge  of  things  self- 
evident.  This  he  contrasts  with  "  reasoning,"  or  "  the 
second  degree  of  reason,"  which  draws  conclusions  that 
are  not  self-evident  judgments  of  this  "  common  sense." 
It  was  under  the  guidance  of  such  a  principle  that  he  sought 
to  restore  the  reality  of  the  object-world,  and  to  rescue 
it  from  the  pillage  and  plunder  which  it  had  suffered  under 
the  pens  of  the  subjective  idealists.  In  some  very  material 
respects  he  was  a  true  pioneer  of  the  New  Realists. 

Such  was  the  distinctive  tenet  of  the  founder  of  the 
Scottish  philosophy,  a  philosophy  which  was  destined  to 
go  to  pieces  under  the  influence  of  Scottish  professors  who 
had  learned  something,  but  not  enough,  from  Kant.  To 
Kant  himself  it  is  now  time  again  to  refer,  for  he  was  the 
other  thinker  who,  like  Reid,  so  far  as  the  result  went, 
but  in  a  fashion  wholly  different,  controverted  the  con- 
clusions drawn  by  Hume  from  the  premises  furnished  by 
Locke  and  by  Berkeley. 

Kant,  unlike  Reid,  found  no  satisfaction  in  Natural 
Realism.  He  insisted  that  this  doctrine  could  be  placed 
on  no  secure  foundation  in  the  absence  of  a  critical  examina- 
tion, as  its  preliminary,  of  the  nature  of  knowledge  itself. 
Such  an  examination  he  regarded  as  a  method  by  employ- 
ing which  we  might  reach  what  underlay  the  act  of 
knowing,  and  with  this  in  view  he  set  himself  to  analyse 
and  resolve  into  constituent  factors  knowledge  itself.  He 
was  the  early  exponent  of  that  sort  of  "  epistemology  " 
which  the  New  Realists  hold  in  contempt,  but  which  they 
really  reject  less  thoroughly  than  did  idealists  later  than 
Kant,  in  so  far  as  they  show  hesitation  in  allocating  to 
objectivity  features  that  are  apparently  of  a  mental 
nature. 

The  Konigsberg  professor  saw  clearly  what  Berkeley 
and  Hume  had  done.  They  had  reduced  experience  to 

>  Reid's  Works,  ed.  Hamilton,  p.  96, 


KANT  297 

an  aggregate  of  self -subs  istent  entities,  denying  to  them 
relations  to  each  other  that  could  be  intrinsic  and  essential, 
or  such  as  would  in  the  main  be  of  the  character  described 
in  the  technical  jargon  of  to-day  as  internal  and  not 
external.  Berkeley  and  after  him  Hume  had  thus 
violently  deprived  experience  of  those  meanings  which 
it  possesses  for  knowledge  of  all  kinds,  and  had  so  isolated 
these  meanings  as  to  render  them  an  easy  prey  for  the 
sceptics.  Kant  determined  to  bring  the  wandering  mean- 
ings back  within  a  fold  where  they  would  be  as  secure  as 
experience  itself.  He  set  himself  to  prove  that  experience 
could  not  exist  at  all  in  the  absence  of  at  least  certain  of 
them.  This  he  found  to  be  especially  the  case  with  such 
relations  of  things  as  give  them  their  quantitative  aspects, 
and  also  their  positions  as  depending,  actually  or  possibly, 
on  each  other.  In  our  judgments  we  determine  things  as 
being  in  such  relations,  and,  therefore,  if  we  wish  to 
discover  what  the  primitive  characters  of  the  relations 
are,  we  had  better  turn  to  the  forms  of  judgment  in  ordinary 
logic  and  see  what  we  find  there.  By  doing  this  Kant 
found  a  dozen  such  forms  or  categories  which  have  to  be 
applied  in  order  to  constitute  the  experience  of  the  actual 
world  which  we  find  when  we  look  within  ourselves  or 
when  we  perceive  what  is  external  in  nature.  Apart 
from  the  significance  or  meaning  which  has  made  that 
world  a  real  one  for  us  it  would  not  exist  at  all.  He 
therefore  pronounced  his  categories  to  be  the  very  con- 
ditions through  which  experience  was  rendered  possible. 
They  are  contributions  which  mind  makes  to  its  con- 
stitution. As  such  he  calls  them  transcendental,  indicating 
by  this  name  that  they  are  conditions  of  experience  as  it 
is  for  us,  inasmuch  as  without  them  our  experience  could 
not  be  ;  and  he  distinguishes  the  knowledge  of  experience 
got  through  them  from  knowledge  that  it  aims  at  being 
transcendent,  in  the  sense  that  it  seeks  to  reach  what  lies 
outside  actual  experience,  and  cannot  be  attained  in  it  at  all. 
Thought  was  thus  presupposed  by  experience,  and  to 
thought  it  owed  those  characteristics,  such  as  the  certainty 
that  two  and  two  will  always  make  four,  and  that  every 
change  must  have  a  cause,  which  are  made  inherent  in  it  as 
it  is  assumed  in  our  daily  life  to  be.  It  is  thus  that,  for 
Kant,  mind  could  not  be  resolved,  as  Hume  had  sought  to 
resolve  it,  into  a  discrete  series  of  mere  independent  impres- 


298  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

sions,  which,  even  for  the  latter,  had  the  inexplicable  quality 
of  being  aware  of  itself  as  a  continuous  unity.  Mind, 
therefore,  in  so  far  as  it  performed  its  constitutive  function, 
could  not  itself  be  an  object  in  the  experience  to  which 
it  was  itself  giving  rise.  For  in  so  performing  its  function 
Kant  held  that  it  gave  their  essential  features  to  all 
objects  which  could  arise  for  it.  This  it  did  by  the  very 
character  of  its  operation.  That  operation  took  place  by 
the  imposition  of  two  mental  forms,  in  themselves  empty, 
called  time  and  space.  In  these  mind  arranged  a  raw 
material  of  orderless  sensation  which  was  there  indepen- 
dently of  it,  and  might  be  taken,  for  all  Kant  knew  to  the 
contrary,  to  proceed  from  some  unknown  and  unknowable 
thing-in-itself.  The  empty  forms  just  referred  to  were 
by  the  activity  of  mind  schematised  into  replicas  of  the 
twelve  categories,  and  in  this  way  it  had  the  means  to 
hand  of  fashioning  the  raw  material  of  sensation  into 
intelligible  forms,  which  included  those,  not  only  of  nature, 
but  of  our  individual  selves  as  objects  so  constructed. 
As  I  have  said,  there  were  for  Kant  twelve  modes  or 
categories  of  thought  in  which  this  unifying  activity 
operated.  To  enable  these  to  do  their  work  there  were 
the  two  subjective  forms  in  which  the  construction  took 
place,  space  and  time,  and  finally  there  was  postulated 
the  raw  material  of  sensation  and  feeling  which  was 
arranged  or  schematised  within  the  two  forms  by  the 
activity  of  thought  operating  on  the  principles  expressed 
in  the  categories.  These  last,  which,  as  already  observed, 
he  limited  to  twelve  in  number,  wrere  derived  from  the 
study  of  the  operations  of  thought  in  judgment  as 
described  by  the  formal  logic  of  the  day,  in  its  material 
features  an  inheritance  from  Aristotle,  and  they  included 
such  relations  as  substantiality,  causality,  and  reciprocity. 
In  point  of  fact  all  these  categories  are  primarily  those 
concerned  with  mechanical  arrangement,  for  beyond 
mechanical  arrangement  Kant's  conception  of  experience 
as  actual  did  not  really  take  him.  It  was  just  this  limita- 
tion of  experience  to  the  externality  of  mechanism  which 
later  on  was  to  lead  philosophers  like  Bergson  to  break 
away  from  Kant's  epistemology,  and  to  say  that  the  real 
was  something  quite  different  from  and  of  a  higher  order 
than  anything  that  an  intellect  so  limited  could  apprehend 
in  experience.  For  the  intellect,  throughout  the  course 


HIS    MECHANISTIC    TENDENCY  299 

of  experience  as  Kant  conceived  it,  was  confined,  by  the 
limits  within  which  alone  it  could  operate,  to  the  appre- 
hension of  phenomena  external  to  and  exclusive  of  each 
other  in  space  or  time  or  both. 

Kant's  method  was  thus  by  a  scrutiny  of  experience  to 
determine  the  conditions  which  must  be  inferred  as  neces- 
sary to  explain  its  production.  These  were  the  conditions 
which,  as  I  have  already  mentioned,  he  called  transcen- 
dental, and  which  he  distinguished  from  inferences, 
however  much  suggested  to  us  in  our  reflection,  of  what 
was  transcendent,  that  is  incapable  of  being  in  any  way 
brought  within  experience. 

The  process  was  of  course  not  one  in  time  and  equally 
not  in  space.  It  was  foundational  to  reality  in  both, 
and  so  was  metempirical.  For  Kant  time  was  a  form 
under  which  was  brought  all  experience,  inward  and  out- 
ward alike.  Space,  on  the  other  hand,  was  the  form  or 
framework  in  which  appeared  what  we  call  external 
experience.  Because  time  and  space  were  forms  imposed 
by  the  mind,  without  which  there  could  be  no  experience 
at  all,  they  were  a  priori  and  the  constructions  made  in 
them  were  of  universal  validity.  Thus  mathematical 
principles,  the  outcome  of  construction  in  these  forms 
applied  to  an  object- world  which  could  only  come  into 
existence  through  them,  were  not  only  of  universal  validity, 
but,  because  their  principles  recorded  the  results  of 
a  priori  construction  by  the  understanding  in  pure  time 
and  space,  they  added  to  knowledge.  Hume  had  appar- 
ently destroyed  the  claim  to  universal  validity  of  all 
supposed  mathematical  truths  of  a  synthetic  kind.  But 
Kant,  by  referring  to  the  conditions  which  rendered 
mathematical  experience  possible,  had  restored  them  to 
their  kingdom.  He  was  able  similarly  to  assert  against 
Hume  that  the  relations  of  substance  and  accident  and 
cause  and  effect,  which  the  latter  had  attacked,  were 
essential  relations  in  the  construction  of  experience  by  the 
understanding,  and  therefore  capable  of  establishment 
as  universally  valid  a  priori  for  objects  of  experience.  But 
the  understanding,  just  because  it  was  confined  to  such 
experience  as  it  could  construct  through  its  limited  table 
of  categories,  could  establish  no  reality  other  than  a 
merely  mechanistic  one,  for  the  restricted  nature  of  the 
twelve  categories  through  which  understanding  operated 


800  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

in  the  construction  of  experience  confined  the  field  of 
reality  to  what  that  nature  admitted  of. 

The  world,  however,  although  it  might  be  said  not  to 
be  more  than  such  a  finite  experience,  certainly  meant  more 
for  us.  This  further  and  deeper  meaning  Kant  found  in 
the  work  of  Practical  Reason,  which  postulates,  as  morally 
essential,  ideals  that  go  beyond  the  empirical  world  due  to 
judgments  of  Understanding,  ideals  of  Reason,  such  as 
those  of  God,  Freedom,  and  Immortality.  These  seemed 
to  be  required  by  the  conditions  of  moral  life,  and  although 
they  could  not  be  realised  in  experience,  they  were  not  on 
that  account  to  be  dismissed  as  unreal  in  a  different  sense. 
But  Kant  did  not  stop  here.  In  his  third  Critique,  that 
of  Judgment,  he  showed  the  necessity,  if  certain  most 
important  aspects  of  the  world  as  it  seems  were  to  be 
explained,  of  introducing,  between  the  simple  apprehension, 
on  the  one  hand,  by  which  we  come  to  our  actual  yet 
limited  experience,  and  the  practical  reason  by  which, 
on  the  other  hand,  we  recognise  moral  ideals,  yet  another 
series  of  governing  ideals  which  determine  the  judgment 
when  it  pronounces  of  things  that  they  embody  ends, 
or  are  so  fashioned  as  to  be  beautiful.  Teleology  and 
mechanism  belong  to  different  orders  of  knowledge,  and 
it  was  the  task  of  the  Critique  of  Judgment  to  reconcile 
them.  This  it  did  by  pronouncing  final  causes  to  be 
merely  regulative  principles,  necessarily  regulative  of 
the  activity  of  the  mind  in  surveying  nature,  but  not 
actually  included  in  the  reality  of  objective  nature  itself. 
It  was  conceivable  that  another  kind  of  understanding, 
not  discursive  like  our  own,  which  in  its  relation  to 
the  actual  always  proceeds  from  parts  to  other  parts 
and  to  their  mechanical  aggregates,  might  grasp  its  ex- 
perience differently,  and  find  teleological  universals,  such 
as  ends  and  beauty,  actual  in  it.  Such  an  understanding, 
if  it  existed,  would  be  an  intuitive  understanding  which 
would  comprehend  in  direct  perception  all  the  phases 
that  came  before  the  mind,  as  the  outcome  of  a  single 
principle. 

It  was  this  notion  of  an  intuitive  understanding,  taken 
up  by  Kant  only  to  be  laid  aside,  which  proved  fruitful 
in  the  hands  of  his  successors,  and  ultimately  gave 
birth  to  modern  idealism.  What  Kant  had  accom- 
plished was  to  turn  metaphysical  inquiry  into  a  new 


THE    REVOLUTION    EFFECTED  301 

channel ;  it  was  for  those  who  came  after  him  to  develop 
its  course. 

But  if  we  glance  back  at  Hume  we  see  clearly  the 
revolution  which  even  Kant  had  accomplished.  He  had 
set  criticism  to  work  on  the  notion  of  mind  as  a  thing, 
and  had  pointed  out  the  insufficiency  for  it  of  such  a 
conception.  For  him  the  essential  nature  of  the  mind 
lay  in  its  foundational  activity  as  intelligence,  and  not  in 
its  being,  from  the  merely  relatively  justifiable  standpoint 
of  psychology,  a  thing  or  a  property  of  a  thing.  I  am 
speaking  here  of  the  transcendental  synthesis  or  ego,  which 
he  inferred  as  the  indispensable  condition  of  there  being 
any  experience  at  all.  Introspective  experience  would  of 
course  display  a  finite  self  of  a  different  kind,  a  train  of 
perceptions  and  feelings,  constructed,  like  other  experience, 
under  the  time  form,  and  fashioned  into  an  object  in  the 
world  of  perceptive  experience.  The  pure  subject,  on  the 
other  hand,  to  which  the  unity  of  all  thought  must  be 
referred,  we  could  know  directly  only  to  the  extent  of 
being  conscious  that  it  existed.  The  form  of  self-know- 
ledge, as  perceptive  of  self  as  an  object,  tells  us  also  of 
a  "  What"  but  then  this  is  for  Kant  only  knowledge  of  a 
phenomenal  self  as  it  appears  under  construction  in  time, 
a  succession  of  states  subjected  to  the  form  of  inner 
sense  in  which  we  apprehend  it. 

It  is  the  distinction  between  these  meanings  of  the  self 
that  differentiates  Kant  from  his  predecessors,  and  enables 
him  to  refuse  the  path  which  led  to  Hume's  precipice. 
The  self  was  analysed  by  Hume  into  a  succession  of 
impressions  and  ideas  as  regards  which  it  could  be  no 
more  than  passively  recipient,  if  it  could  be  even  so  much. 
If  he  did  not  call  it  a  substance,  with  Berkeley,  it  was 
because  he  would  not  allow  the  title  of  the  self  to  be 
even  this.  Such  substantiality  was  not  disclosed  by  his 
method,  and  for  that  method  had  no  significance.  But 
to  the  question  how  a  mere  succession  of  impressions  and 
ideas  could  be  aware  of  itself  as  such  he  had  no  answer. 
Here  was  a  fact  of  experience  which  required  something 
like  the  transcendental  method  of  the  critical  philosophy 
to  throw  light  on  it,  a  method  which  should  begin  by 
asking  the  question  how  the  experience  with  which  Hume 
had  sought  to  start  was  possible  at  all. 

Hume  had  reduced  reality  to  a  succession  of  ideas  of 
21 


302  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

the  self,  connected  only  by  their  association  in  the  mind, 
and  the  self  he  had  endeavoured  to  resolve  into  this 
succession  and  nothing  beyond.  Kant  had  shown  that 
in  order  to  account  for  the  fact  of  our  actual  knowledge  of 
even  such  a  succession  much  more  than  a  series  of  isolated 
ideas  was  required.  He  did  not,  like  the  New  Realists, 
say  that  the  relations  which  held  these  ideas  together 
and  united  them  into  the  whole  which  experience  dis- 
played, were  themselves,  though  universals  and  not 
particulars  of  feeling  or  sensation,  part  of  a  non-mental 
world.  So  far  as  the  raw  material  on  which  the  mind 
operated  in  construction  was  concerned,  he  held  that  it 
was  formless  and  came  from  an  unknowable  source,  a 
thing-in-itself.  Experience,  in  other  words  existence 
itself,  was  for  Kant  thus  an  appearance  that  was  not 
ultimate,  but  one  which  was  built  up  by  a  self  which  was 
not  a  thing  but  a  transcendental  activity  of  a  mental 
character,  setting  up  and  filling  in  a  framework  of  a 
limited  character.  In  other  language,  instead  of  taking 
the  world  as  a  "  That  "  from  which  he  had  to  start,  and 
behind  which  he  could  not  get,  he  had  explained  it  as 
the  result  of  a  process  of  construction  out  of  epistemo- 
logically  obtained  elements.  He  might,  if  he  had  acted 
on  the  suggestions  in  his  Critique  of  Judgment,  have 
enlarged  his  conception  of  the  self  so  as  to  make  it  not 
separate  from  or  poorer  than  the  world  in  which  it  found 
itself.  Indeed,  at  one  time  he  had  hinted  that  the  self, 
which  was  one  root  of  experience,  and  the  thing-in-itself, 
which  was  the  other  root,  might  have  a  common  origin 
and  a  common  nature.  But  as  to  this  he  was  careful  to 
make  no  definite  pronouncement.  His  system,  therefore, 
in  the  result  proved  on  scrutiny  to  be  defective.  What 
was  the  self  apart  from  its  experience  ?  What  meaning 
could  be  attached  to  the  antithetic  thing-in-itself  ?  What 
was  the  meaning  of  the  antithesis  ?  Why  should  the 
categories  of  the  Understanding  be  limited  to  twelve,  or 
at  all,  and  the  ideals  of  the  Reason  and  the  Judgment,  as 
distinguished  from  the  Understanding  with  its  mechanistic 
categories,  be  excluded  from  any  share  in  the  constitu- 
tion of  experience  as  reality.  All  these  questions  and 
others  were  asked  and  presently  answered  in  a  sense 
different  from  what  was  admissible  from  Kant's  standpoint. 
It  was  denied  that  knowledge  could  be  laid,  as  he  had 


THE    DISSECTION    OF    KNOWLEDGE  303 

laid  it,  on  the  dissecting  table  and  resolved  into  bits.  Was 
it  not  only  within  experience  that  such  a  process  could  be 
essayed,  and  was  not  knowledge  presupposed  in  its 
integrity  as  the  foundation  of  the  very  endeavour  ? 

It  is  no  part  of  my  purpose  to  write  the  history  of 
philosophy,  nor  to  show  the  stages  through  which  the 
answers  to  the  searching  questions  just  mentioned  pro- 
ceeded after  Kant's  time.  All  that  is  necessary  for  the 
object  of  these  pages  is  to  bring  out  how  the  outstanding 
conceptions  of  reality  arrived  at  after  criticism  of  Kant 
bear  on  the  principle  of  the  relativity  of  knowledge. 

As  Kant  had  split  up  experience  into  two  component 
elements,  one  of  which  was  due  to  the  mind  as  a  factor 
and  the  other  to  the  thing-in-itself,  it  was  natural  that 
divergence  of  tendency  should  know  itself.  Some  philo- 
sophers there  were  who  laid  stress  on  the  latter  factor, 
the  thing-in-itself,  which  provided  the  element  of  sensation 
or  feeling.  Others  there  were  who  took  an  opposite  course 
and  asked  whether  the  operation  of  mind  in  constituting 
experience  ought  not  to  have  its  scope  regarded  more 
widely  than  Kant  had  done,  and  be  treated  as  extending 
to  matter  as  well  as  form. 

I  will  touch  first  on  the  tendency  of  those  who  adopted 
the  former  course,  and  sought  to  approach  reality  from 
the  side  of  its  matter,  but  yet  with  the  aid  of  the  Kantian 
view  of  experience  as  requiring  the  intelligence  without 
which  it  could  not  have  the  significance  we  find  in  it.  This 
school  turned  its  attention  to  the  supposed  thing-in-itself, 
and  declared  that  its  nature  was  not  inaccessible  to  the 
human  mind,  as  Kant  had  thought.  The  mode  of  access, 
however,  they  agreed  with  him  in  thinking  could  not  be 
knowledge.  But  there  seemed  to  exist  a  direct  awareness 
which  might  be  named  intuition,  and  through  this  we 
should  be  able  to  ascertain  enough  to  guide  us  to  the 
character  of  the  ultimate  reality. 

Of  this  new  school  a  highly  important  pioneer  was 
Arthur  Schopenhauer.  His  work  has  been  superseded  by 
that  of  Bergson  in  an  analogous  direction.  For  that  of 
Bergson  is  more  thorough,  and  he  has  made  use  of  copious 
material  which  science  has  provided  since  Schopenhauer 
passed  away.  Still  Schopenhauer  stands  out  as  a  great 
figure  in  the  history  of  modern  speculative  thought.  He 
did  what  William  James  did  later  on,  in  America,  he 


804  REALISM   AND    IDEALISM 

sowed  the  soil  with  seminal  ideas.  Of  these  the  chief  one 
was  that  while  knowledge  must,  as  Kant  had  shown,  be 
impossible  to  conceive  as  a  property  of  a  thing,  still 
reflection  could  get  behind  itself,  and  resolve  even  know- 
ledge into  a  form  of  the  activity  of  will. 

Before  looking  at  what  this  imports  from  the  point  of 
view  of  relativity,  it  is  worth  noting  that  the  very  character 
of  the  principle  made  it  an  unfortunate  one  for  the 
founding  of  a  school.  Mathematicians  can  easily  found 
schools  of  continuous  thought,  because  their  concern  is 
a  body  of  propositions  about  order  in  externality  based 
on  direct  deliverances  through  sense.  There  are,  therefore, 
more  or  less  indisputable  facts  relating  to  space  and  time, 
on  which  agreement  can  rest,  and  which  form  an  accepted 
test  of  initial  truth.  In  logic  and  even  in  metaphysics, 
while  this  is  not  so  to  nearly  the  same  extent,  there  may 
still  be  available  general  criteria  as  tests  for  our  reasoning. 
They  are  less  of  an  objective  nature  than  those  of  science, 
but  still,  provided  we  are  dealing  with  abstract  reasoning 
such  as  a  judge  has  to  deal  with  in  deciding  on  the  validity 
of  an  argument  on  a  point  of  law,  a  generally  approved 
conclusion,  conformable  to  these  criteria,  is  at  least 
intelligible.  But  when  we  come  to  the  domain  of  what 
is  supposed  to  be  immediate  awareness,  to  feeling  for 
which  it  is  a  condition  that  the  stabilising  influence  of 
reflection  should  have  been  extruded,  the  case  is  other- 
wise. Whether  the  form  assumed  by  the  doctrine  is  that 
of  intuition  as  a  basis  of  science,  or  of  intuition  as  a  basis 
of  mysticism,  the  result  is  not  materially  different.  For 
the  basis  reached  depends  on  mere  individual  awareness 
to  an  extent  that  renders  it  in  the  main  subjective  and 
incommunicable.  The  particular  has  been  separated  from 
the  universality  or  identity  which  belongs  to  reflection, 
and  not  to  sense  as  such,  and  is  the  foundation  on  which 
the  possibility  of  adequate  communication  rests.  Systems, 
therefore,  such  as  that  of  Schopenhauer,  as  a  rule  are 
accepted  by  no  large  school  and  are  not  permanent.  Their 
value  is  as  instruments  for  criticism  ;  they  raise  a  negative 
which  can  be  usefully  incorporated  as  a  qualification  of 
what  it  is  directed  against.1 

1  Although  Schopenhauer  founded  no  school,  he  has  left  individual 
disciples  who  follow  him  with  devotion,  and  some,  at  least,  of  these 
would  deny  what  I  have  just  said.  One  of  his  adherents  of  to-day, 


SCHOPENHAUER  805 

This  kind  of  isolation  quite  naturally  fell  to  Schopen- 
hauer, but  it  was  intensified  in  his  case  by  his  difficult 
personality.  He  was  impatient  of  the  apparent  neglect 
of  his  gospel  by  the  professors  and  the  universities,  and  he 
did  not  conceal  what  he  thought  of  them.  Why  he  never 
got  a  chair  is  not  wonderful.  Here  are  a  few  winged 
words  (typical  of  many  other  sayings  of  his)  which  appear 
in  the  preface,  written  in  1844,  to  the  second  edition  of 
his  greatest  book,  The  World  as  Will  and  Idea.  Referring 
to  the  idealism  still  current  in  these  days  in  the  German 
universities,  he  remarks  : 

"  This  is  a  doctrine  which  it  is  only  necessary  to  impose 
upon  the  reader  at  starting,  in  order  to  pass  in  the  most 
comfortable  manner  in  the  world,  as  it  were  in  a  chariot 
and  four,  into  that  region  beyond  the  possibility  of  all 
experience  which  Kant  has  wholly  and  for  ever  shut  out 
from  our  knowledge,  and  in  which  are  found  immediately 
revealed  and  most  beautifully  arranged  the  fundamental 
dogmas  of  modern  Judaising,  optimistic,  Christianity. 
Now  what  in  the  world  has  my  subtle  philosophy,  deficient 
as  it  is  in  these  essential  requisites,  with  no  intentional 
aim,  and  unable  to  afford  a  means  of  subsistence,  whose 
pole-star  is  truth  alone,  the  naked,  unrewarded,  un- 
befriended,  often  persecuted  truth,  and  which  steers 
straight  for  it,  without  looking  to  the  right  hand  or  the 
left,  what,  I  say,  has  this  to  do  with  that  alma  mater, 
the  good,  well-to-do  university  philosophy  which,  burdened 
with  a  hundred  aims  and  a  thousand  motives,  comes  on 

R.  H.  Franc6,  has  just  published  a  rather  notable  essay  on  Relativity, 
with  the  title  Zoesis  (Munich,  1920).  As  the  name  indicates,  the  basis  is 
Schopenhauer's  principle  that  we  are  directly  aware  of  Will,  the  final 
reality,  in  our  bodily  life,  by  the  analogy  of  which  we  interpret  the 
rest  of  the  universe.  It  is  out  of  the  impulse  of  the  will  to  realise 
itself  that  knowledge  and  through  it  its  phenomenal  objects  arise.  Our 
experience  and  our  science  have  in  consequence  a  biological  character 
to  which  they  always  come  back,  and  so  have  the  final  standards  of 
reference  by  which  knowledge  and  reality  are  determined.  France  seeks 
to  show  that  all  phenomena  are,  for  science  as  much  as  for  everyday 
experience,  moulded  by  biological  characters.  He  makes  an  attempt, 
as  earnest  as  it  is  ingenious,  to  exhibit  Einstein's  principle  and  also  the 
"  Quanta  "  theory  of  Max  Planck  as  the  outcome  of  a  system  of  refer- 
ence thus  determined.  He  carries  his  investigation  into  the  region  of 
chemistry  also,  and  he  exhibits  command  of  scientific  detail  in  each  case. 
But  for  him  the  Einstein  principle  of  relativity  is  of  course  only  a  par- 
ticular application  of  a  wider  principle,  which  requires  philosophy  such  aa 
that  of  Schopenhauer  for  its  interpretation.  It  is  interesting  to  observe 
how  views  of  this  kind  are  now  being  put  forward  with  much  vigour  in 
Germany. 


306  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

its  course  cautiously  tacking,  while  it  keeps  before  its  eyes 
at  all  times  the  fear  of  the  Lord,  the  will  of  the  Ministry, 
the  laws  of  the  Established  Church,  the  wishes  of  the 
publisher,  the  attendance  of  the  students,  the  goodwill 
of  colleagues,  the  course  of  current  politics,  the  momentary 
tendency  of  the  public,  and  Heaven  knows  what  besides  ?  " 

The  old  cynic  was  left  to  live  in  solitude  at  Frankfort- 
on-the-Main,  where,  without  wife  or  child,  and  accompanied 
only  by  "  Young  Schopenhauer,"  his  dog,  he  used  to  take 
a  daily  walk  across  the  river  bridge.  But  his  general 
knowledge,  perhaps  in  consequence,  became  enormous. 
He  levied  a  contribution  on  every  form  of  learning.  He 
was  a  master  of  the  history  of  literature,  as  well  as  of  art 
and  music,  and  the  evidences  of  what  these  meant  for 
him  are  everywhere  apparent  in  the  books  he  published. 
His,  too,  was  a  really  fine  literary  style.  In  short,  if  ever 
a  man  was  equipped  to  be  the  philosopher  of  intuition  it 
was  Schopenhauer,  whose  appreciation  of  what  can  only 
be  felt  was  not  less  than  his  intellectual  grasp. 

Among  the  few  thinkers  for  whom  he  had  any  reverence 
Kant  stands  out  prominent.  He  demands  an  acquaintance 
on  the  part  of  his  readers 

"  with  the  most  important  phenomenon  that  has  appeared 
in  philosophy  for  two  thousand  years ;  I  mean  the 
principal  writings  of  Kant.  It  seems  to  me,  in  fact,  as 
indeed  has  already  been  said  by  others,  that  the  effect 
these  writings  produce  in  the  mind  to  which  they  truly 
speak  is  very  like  that  of  an  operation  for  cataract  on  a 
blind  man."  "  For  Kant's  teaching  produces  in  the  mind 
of  everyone  who  has  comprehended  it  a  fundamental 
change  which  is  so  great  that  it  may  be  regarded  as  an 
intellectual  new  birth."  "  On  the  other  hand,  he  who  has 
not  mastered  the  Kantian  philosophy,  whatever  else  he 
may  have  studied,  is,  as  it  were,  in  a  state  of  innocence ; 
that  is  to  say,  he  remains  in  the  grasp  of  that  natural  and 
childish  realism  in  which  we  are  all  born,  and  which  fits 
us  for  everything  possible,  with  the  single  exception  of 
philosophy." 

Schopenhauer  none  the  less,  as  I  have  said,  sought  to 
go  behind  Kant's  insistence  on  the  foundational  character 


HIS    DIVERGENCE    FROM    KANT  807 

of  knowledge,  and  this  he  was  able  to  do,  without  glaring 
inconsistency  with  the  principles  of  his  master,  just  because 
the  latter  had  confined  this  foundational  character  to 
what  was  sufficient  to  account  for  only  a  limited  form  of 
experience.  Had  Kant  .been  in  bitter  earnest  with  the 
doctrine  that  knowledge  was  a  final  fact  and  all-compre- 
hensive, his  disciple  could  not  have  got  where  he  did 
without  openly  breaking  with  the  doctrine.  But  Kant 
had  left  as  open  questions  the  natures  of  the  raw  material 
of  feeling  and  of  the  thing-in-itself.  Schopenhauer,  there- 
fore, as  Bergson  has  done  since  his  time,  proceeded  to  look 
further  afield.  He  arrived  at  the  conclusion  that,  however 
much  in  the  rest  of  our  external  experience  we  are  confined 
to  what  is  phenomenal  and  arises  from  the  operation  of 
the  understanding  as  constructive,  in  our  direct  awareness 
of  our  bodily  life  we  have  disclosed  to  us,  in  an  intuition 
which  is  not  mediated  by  thought,  something  of  a  wholly 
divergent  nature,  the  will  as  the  ultimate  fact  in  reality. 
By  analogy  we  extend  this  disclosure  to  things  other  than 
our  bodies.  Will  becomes  the  "  key  to  the  nature  of 
every  phenomenon  in  nature."  Besides  will  and  ideas  of 
perception  nothing  is  known  to  us  of  any  reality,  or  is 
even  thinkable.  That  the  self-disclosure  of  will  gives 
rise  to  knowledge  and  to  motives  which  arise  only  through 
knowledge,  does  for  him  not  affect  the  point.  For  these 
do  not  belong  to  the  nature  of  the  will,  which  has  nothing 
to  do  with  consciousness,  but  to  its  manifestation  in 
phenomenal  form  in  a  human  being  or  an  animal.  What 
we  are  aware  of  as  our 

"  voluntary  movements  are  nothing  else  than  the  visible 
aspects  of  the  individual  acts  of  will,  with  which  they  are 
directly  coincident  and  identical,  and  only  distinguished 
through  the  form  of  knowledge  into  which  they  have 
passed,  and  in  which  alone  they  can  be  known,  the  form 
of  idea." 

That  is  why  he  gave  his  book  the  title  of  The  World  as 
Will  and  Idea. 

So  far  as  the  idea,  that  is  perceptive  knowledge,  is 
concerned,  he  agrees  with  Kant  in  treating  space  and  time 
as  forms  in  which  intelligence  constructs  phenomena. 
But  as  regards  the  activity,  attributed  by  Kant  to  mind 


308  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

in  the  shape  of  the  twelve  fundamental  modes  of  opera- 
tion which  were  for  the  latter  the  categories,  he  differs. 
The  activity  of  mind  assumed  for  Schopenhauer,  not  these 
twelve  forms,  but  that  of  a  simpler  "  Principle  of  Sufficient 
Reason  "  according  to  which  it  operated  in  various  modes. 
At  the  foundation,  however,  of  the  activity  of  mind  and 
of  its  phenomenal  activity  generally,  lay  will,  just  as 
analogously  Bergson  was,  later  on,  to  find  the  foundation 
in  a  different  form  of  creative  activity  with  the  character 
of  unspatialised  duration.  Schopenhauer  holds  that  he 
has  adequately  expressed  the  character  of  our  conception 
of  the  relation  of  the  will  to  the  phenomenal  world  by 
explaining  it  to  be,  not  the  relation  of  an  abstract 

"  idea  to  another  idea,  or  to  the  necessary  form  of  per- 
ceptive or  of  abstract  ideation,  but  the  relation  of  a 
judgment  to  the  connection  which  an  idea  of  perception, 
the  body,  has  to  that  which  is  not  an  idea  at  all,  but 
something  toto  genere  different,  will." 

He  thus  distinguishes  this  principle  from  all  other  truth. 
We  infer,  from  the  analogy  of  our  own  bodily  con- 
sciousness, not  only  that  will  objectifies  itself  throughout 
nature,  but  that  it  does  so  in  ever  ascending  grades,  as  in 
the  vegetable  and  animal  kingdoms.  At  the  higher 
grades  we  reach  a  point  where  the  individual  can  no 
longer  get  food  for  its  assimilation  only  by  movement 
following  on  mere  stimuli.  Movement  has  to  be  directed 
by  motives,  and  so  consciousness  becomes  a  necessary 
further  grade  in  the  objectification  of  will.  A  developed 
brain  appears,  and  knowledge,  along  with  the  world  as 
idea,  comes  into  existence. 

"  Thus  knowledge  generally,  rational  as  well  as  merely 
sensuous,  proceeds  originally  from  the  will  itself." 
"  Originally  destined  for  the  service  of  the  will,  in  the 
accomplishment  of  its  aims,  it  remains  almost  throughout 
entirely  subjected  to  its  service  ;  it  is  so  in  all  brutes  and 
almost  in  all  men.  Yet  we  shall  see  in  the  Third  Book 
how,  in  certain  individual  men,  knowledge  can  deliver 
itself  from  this  bondage,  throw  off  its  yoke,  and,  free  from 
all  the  aims  of  will,  exist  purely  for  itself,  simply  as  a 
clear  mirror  of  the  world,  which  is  the  source  of  art. 


PRINCIPLE  OF  DEGREES  WITH  SCHOPENHAUER  809 

Finally,  in  the  Fourth  Book,  we  shall  see  how,  if  this  kind 
of  knowledge  reacts  on  the  will,  it  can  bring  about  self- 
surrender,  i.e.  resignation,  which  is  the  final  goal,  and 
indeed  the  inmost  nature  of  all  virtue  and  holiness,  and 
its  deliverance  from  the  world." 

Besides  the  grades  of  objectification  which  the  experi- 
ence of  nature  exhibits,  there  are,  for  Schopenhauer,  still 
more  fundamental  gradations  of  the  forms  in  which  will 
objectifies  itself  that  are  manifested  in  innumerable 
individuals,  and  exist  as  their  unattained  types  or  as 
eternal  forms  of  things,  not  themselves  entering  into 
space  and  time,  which  are  the  medium  of  individual 
things,  but  remaining  fixed,  subject  to  no  change,  always 
being,  never  becoming,  while  the  particular  things  arise 
and  pass  away,  always  become  and  never  are.  These 
latter  grades  of  the  objectification  of  will  are  analogous  to 
the  Platonic  Ideas,  which  are  necessarily  object,  something 
known,  and  in  that  respect  different  from  the  thing-in- 
itself,  but  in  that  respect  alone.  The  subordinate  forms 
of  the  phenomenon,  which  arise  out  of  the  principle  of 
sufficient  reason  that  corresponds  to  the  transforming 
activity  of  the  perceiving  mind  through  its  categories,  are 
not  yet  assumed  here,  but  there  is  present  the  first  and 
most  universal  form,  that  of  idea  in  general,  the  form  of 
being  object  for  a  subject.  In  this  way  the  doctrine  of 
degrees  in  knowledge  and  reality  appears  in  the  philosophy 
of  Schopenhauer  in  a  special  fashion. 

I  have  now  done  enough  to  admit  of  some  glimpse  into 
the  manner  in  which  he  really  breaks  from  Kant,  whom  he 
somewhat  hypocritically  extols  as  his  spiritual  father. 
He  has  seen  that  the  way  of  Kant  ended  at  a  point  where 
the  path  divided  into  two  alternative  and  diverging 
further  paths.  The  one  led  in  the  direction  of  divesting 
knowledge  of  every  trace  of  having  a  merely  instrumental 
character,  and  freeing  it  from  the  appearance  of  subjec- 
tivity ;  the  other  led  to  the  retention  of  this  character, 
and  to  the  degradation  of  knowledge  from  the  considerable 
position  assigned  to  it  in  Kant's  explanation  of  the  real, 
by  making  it  the  mere  servile  instrument  of  his  thing-in- 
itself  endowed  with  a  positive  character.  This  Schopen- 
hauer sought  to  accomplish  by  identifying  will  with  what 
was  for  his  master  the  caput  mortuum  of  the  thing-in-itself. 


810  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

Bergson  has  sought  to  do  something  analogous  in  his 
theory  of  creative  evolution.  But,  although  he  too  has 
been  a  student  of  Kant,  Bergson  has  broken  away  from 
him  more  completely.  His  philosophy  is  now  so  well 
known  in  these  Islands  that  it  is  not  necessary  to  do  more 
than  to  point  out  the  cardinal  feature  in  its  bearing  on 
that  principle  of  the  relativity  of  knowledge  which  is  the 
underlying  conception  of  this  volume. 

The  work  of  Bergson  is  not  less  important  for  its  criticism 
of  Kantianism  than  it  is  for  its  own  constructive  side.  He 
directs  his  attack  largely  against  the  mechanistic  char- 
acter within  which  Kant  sought  to  restrict  experience.  If 
there  be  only  conceptions  of  this  order  which  science  must 
recognise  as  those  to  which  reality  is  limited,  then  he  does 
not  dissent  from  the  conclusion  of  Kant  that  the  inferences 
which  the  latter  felt  bound  to  draw  were  unavoidable. 
But  was  the  method  of  Kant  one  which  was  true  to  the 
facts  as  we  have  them  in  our  direct  experience  ?  Bergson 
thinks  not.  He  insists  that  knowledge,  as  Kant  conceived 
its  nature,  transforms  the  real  instead  of  disclosing  its 
veritable  character.  Let  us  look  first  at  what  Bergson 
says  about  time  and  space.  He  puts  them  on  different 
footings,  attributing  to  time,  when  taken  in  its  integrity, 
a  much  more  intimate  relation  to  reality  than  that  of  space. 
Looking  closely  at  time  we  find  that  when  intelligence 
tries  to  form  an  idea  of  the  movement  of  objects  it  does 
so  by  constructing  movement  out  of  mobilities  put  together. 
Even  in  the  case  of  a  simple  movement,  such  as  raising 
the  arm,  what  is  really  going  on  cannot  be  pictured  in 
conceptual  imagination.  For  the  actual  mobility  cannot 
be  pictured  at  all.  Intelligence  cuts  its  continuity  into 
static  stages  after  the  fashion  of  the  cinematograph.  We 
are  always  spatialising  time  in  this  way.  It  was  this  that 
gave  rise  to  the  apparent  insolubility  of  the  puzzles  pro- 
pounded by  Zeno.  When  we  try  to  think  of  time  we 
represent  it  to  ourselves  under  the  form  of  a  line  made 
up  of  parts  external  to  one  another.  The  temporal  series 
is  conceived  as  made  up  of  odd  moments  analogous  to 
points  in  space. 

At  this  point  in  Bergson's  reasoning  the  question 
suggests  itself  whether  we  dare  assume  that  thought  only 
visualises  its  objects  in  this  spatial  fashion.  Surely  the 
use  it  makes  of  the  images  it  shapes  is  not  to  regard  them 


BERGSON  811 

as  affording  the  ultima  ratio  of  reality,  but  to  treat  them  as 
fraught  with  meaning,  as  the  expression  of  concepts  which 
are  more  than  their  symbols  taken  as  self-contained  could 
express.  How  otherwise  do  we  have  the  conception  of  a 
living  organic  whole  as  giving  significance  to  its  members 
by  being  present  in  them  ?  This  is  no  image  of  a  spatial 
distribution.  Bergson's  own  principle  is  that  the  real  is 
duration,  but  not  mere  succession  of  events  in  time,  treated 
as  though  separate  in  space.  It  is  an  important  principle, 
but  it  requires  to  be  made  intelligible,  and  that  is  possible 
only  through  an  intelligible  conception,  which  goes  beyond 
any  image.  When  he  tells  us  that  we  must  give  up  the 
method  of  construction  which  Kant  employed,  and  look  for 
experience  freed  under  one  aspect  from  the  moulds  into 
which  knowledge  casts  it,  he  makes  a  point  which  is  good 
against  Kant,  but  seems  good  only  because  of  the  limita- 
tions which  Kant's  doctrine  of  the  mechanistic  character 
of  his  categories  imposed  upon  him.  Bergson  holds  that 
knowledge  cannot  give  us  access  to  what  underlies 
spatialised  time,  in  which  part  succeeds  part.  He  therefore 
refers  us  to  direct  intuition,  as  disclosing  the  truly  real 
as  distinguished  from  what  we  make  it  appear  to  us,  a  con- 
crete duration,  or  creative  evolution,  in  which  the  recasting 
of  the  whole  is  always  going  on.  Something  like  this 
Schopenhauer  had  said  before  him  when  he  suggested 
that  we  have  immediate  experience  of  the  will  in  nature. 
But  Schopenhauer  followed  Kant  in  affirming  the  sub- 
jectivity of  time  as  well  as  of  space,  and  Bergson's  form  of 
the  doctrine  is  therefore  quite  fresh.  His  fundamental 
principle  is  that  intuition  enables  us  to  escape  from 
spatial  and  mechanical  views,  and  takes  us  straight  to 
reality,  the  nature  of  which  is  to  be  duration  that  has 
action  as  its  inmost  character,  and  in  which  the  activity 
is  creative,  a  continuous  elaboration  of  what  is  abso- 
lutely new. 

For  Bergson  it  is  only  in  such  an  intuition  that  ultimate 
reality,  or  what  properly  might  be  called  that  which  is 
of  an  absolute  character,  can  be  given.  Everything  else 
falls  within  the  province  of  analysis,  the  operation  on  its 
subject-matter  of  intellect  directed  ab  extra.  By  intuition, 
he  tells  us  in  the  Introduction  to  Metaphysics,  which  he 
has  written  with  a  lucidity  of  diction  with  but  few  instances 
to  rival  it  in  the  whole  history  of  philosophy,  that  he 


312  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

means  the  kind  of  intellectual  sympathy  by  which  one 
places  oneself  within  an  object  in  order  to  coincide  with 
what  is  unique  in  it  and  consequently  inexpressible. 
"  Analysis  is  a  translation,  a  development  into  symbols, 
a  representation  taken  from  successive  points  of  view 
from  which  we  note  as  many  resemblances  as  possible 
between  the  new  object  which  we  are  studying,  and 
others  which  we  believe  we  know  already."  Such  a  repre- 
sentation can  never  be  complete.  Yet  it  is  necessarily  the 
method  of  positive  science,  which  always  works  with 
symbols.  But  metaphysics  has  as  its  object  to  dispense 
with  these  misleading  symbols.  It  is  so  that  we  get  at 
the  meaning  of  our  own  personality.  There  are  no  two 
identical  moments  in  the  life  of  the  same  conscious  being. 
Take  the  simplest  sensation,  suppose  it  constant,  absorb 
in  it  the  entire  personality.  The  consciousness  which  will 
accompany  this  sensation  cannot  remain  identical  with 
itself  for  two  consecutive  moments.  For  the  second 
moment  always  contains,  over  and  above  the  first,  the 
memory  that  the  first  has  transmitted  to  it.  A  conscious- 
ness that  could  experience  two  identical  moments  would 
be  a  consciousness  without  memory.  It  would  die  and 
be  born  again  continually.  It  would  be  unconsciousness. 
The  unrolling  of  the  duration  of  the  inner  life  which  we 
reach  only  in  intuition  resembles,  indeed,  in  some  of  its 
aspects  the  unity  of  an  advancing  movement,  and  in  others 
the  multiplicity  of  expanding  states.  But  no  metaphor 
can  express  one  of  these  two  aspects  without  sacrificing 
the  other.  The  inner  life  is  all  these  things  at  once, 
variety  of  qualities,  continuity  of  progress,  and  unity  of 
direction.  It  cannot  be  represented  in  images,  any  more 
than  in  abstract  concepts. 

But  after  all  it  is  only  by  appealing  to  intelligence  that 
Bergson  has  been  able  to  get  so  far,  and  to  avoid  a  sceptical 
denial  of  the  possibility  of  knowledge.  For  his  intuition 
is  in  truth  akin  in  its  nature  to  what  he  contrasts  it  with. 
But  for  intelligence  his  intuition  would  surely  have  been 
mere  unconsciously  directed  instinct  and  have  remained 
so.  It  is  intelligence  that  has  enabled  him  to  transcend 
the  point  of  view  of  intelligence  itself  as  he  conceives  it. 
Intuition,  in  the  significance  it  possesses  for  him,  resembles 
knowledge  more  than  it  is  different  from  it.  It  is  upon 
knowledge  that  he  falls  back  when  he  has  to  tell  us  what 


THE    CRITICS    OF    BERGSON  813 

intuition  reveals,  even  though  it  be  merely  to  explain  the 
difference  between  the  two. 

I  am  therefore  unable  to  differ  from  the  conclusions  of 
an  American  critic  of  Bergson's  system,  Professor  Watts 
Cunningham,  who  has  worked  out  a  set  of  doubts  on  this 
point  similar  to  my  own  in  a  brilliant  essay  on  the 
Philosophy  of  Bergson.1  We  read  over  here  a  certain 
amount  of  the  philosophical  literature  which  is  being 
poured  out  in  the  New  World,  but  not  as  much  as  is 
desirable.  For  America  has  been  bringing  freshness  of 
mind  to  bear  on  metaphysical  problems  ever  since  the 
days  of  James  and  Royce,  and  this  freshness  is  as  apparent 
in  the  treatment  of  idealism  by  her  thinkers  as  it  is  in 
the  fashioning  of  that  new  realism  which  has  had  its 
home  at  Harvard  and  elsewhere  in  the  United  States,  at 
least  as  much  as  it  has  had  a  home  over  here. 

Therefore  I  do  not  apologise  for  quoting  Professor  Cun- 
ningham when  he  is  expressing  in  his  own  vigorous  way  a 
conclusion  not  different  from  that  to  which  I  have  myself 
come  in  the  question  at  issue.  His  books  are  as  yet  less 
known  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic  than  they  might  well 
be.  But  he  is  still  a  young  man,  and  more  is  likely  to 
be  heard  of  him  later  on. 

*4  Thought,"  he  says,  "  is  a  process  of  interpretation 
whereby  experience  is  unified  and  organised.  It  is  the 
life  of  the  mind  which  finds  expression  in  conscious  experi- 
ence as  a  totality.  It  is  evident  in  common  sense  and 
science,  in  superstition  and  philosophy.  It  gives  us  the 
physical  sciences,  but  it  does  not  stop  there.  It  is  respon- 
sible for  the  biological  and  the  mental  sciences,  but  it  does 
not  stop  even  there.  From  it  come  our  art,  our  religion, 
and  our  philosophy.  It  breathes  through  all  the  ramifi- 
cations of  our  experience,  and  gives  whatever  insights  we 
have  which  are  worth  preserving.  The  true,  the  good, 
and  the  beautiful  are  expressions  of  it ;  for  it  is  our  very 
self -consciousness." 

If  Professor  Cunningham  is  right  we  do  not  remain  in 
any  "  strait- jacket  of  static  and  spatial  moulds."  For  to 
think  the  world  means  simply  to  interpret  it  in  just  such 

1  Longmaas.  1916,  p.  91. 


814  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

an  infinite  variety  and  elasticity  in  combinations  by  intelli- 
gence as  it  demands,  whether  their  characters  be  those  of 
mechanism  or  of  teleological  ends  operating  as  final  causes. 
It  must  be  that  knowledge  transcends  the  categories  of 
mechanism  and  is  something  more  than  an  abstract  under- 
standing of  the  kind  within  which  the  Critique  of  Pure  Reason 
would  restrict  it.  And  when  we  are  asked  to  infer  from 
this  restriction  that  we  have  to  take  refuge  in  an  intuition 
which  is  supposed  to  be  wholly  diverse  in  its  character 
from  any  possible  knowledge,  we  naturally  ask  whether 
he  who  makes  the  demand  has  not  made  it  only  because 
he  has  unduly  narrowed  the  meaning  and  range  of  the 
knowledge  which  gives  significance  and  system  to  our 
experience.  There  is  a  formidable  point  made  in  what 
Professor  Cunningham  says  in  a  later  passage  of  his  book.1 
Discussing  Bergson's  view  that  there  is  no  real  teleology 
in  the  world  process  as  intelligence  represents  it,  inasmuch 
as  the  process  of  accomplishing  an  end  must  consist 
solely  in  the  reproduction  of  a  fixed  and  static  plan,  the 
American  critic  declares  this  view  to  rest  on  the  unjustifi- 
able assumption  that  will  and  intelligence  are  mutually 
exclusive. 

"  The  absurdities  of  the  conception  of  creative  evolution, 
which  in  the  last  analysis  must  be  defined  as  merely  an 
infinite  progression  without  a  goal,  may  all  be  traced  to 
this  fatal  abstraction.  When  we  remove  this  deficiency 
from  our  analysis  of  conscious  experience  and  clearly 
recognise  that  intelligence  is  dynamic,  that,  in  other  words, 
intelligence  and  will  are  only  two  terms  which  we  use  to 
refer  to  two  sides  of  the  same  reality,  we  at  once  see  that 
the  abstract  sort  of  teleology  which  Bergson  so  effectively 
criticises,  and  for  which  he  substitutes  his  conception  of 
creative  evolution,  is  replaced  by  a  more  concrete  teleology, 
creative  finalism,  in  which  the  controlling  ends  themselves 
exist  and  grow  precisely  in  their  own  creation.  This 
view  provides  for  the  reality  of  the  temporal  series  in  such 
a  way  that  the  question  '  How  is  time  real  ?  '  is  not  an 
insoluble  mystery.  For  it  defines  the  evolution  of  reality 
in  just  those  categories  which  conscious  experience 
exemplifies  and  makes  determinate — a  claim  which  cannot 
successfully  be  made  for  the  theory  of  creative  evolution." 

*  p.  179. 


PROFESSOR    WATTS    CUNNINGHAM  315 

The  very  experience  of  enduring  through  time  in  an  appre- 
hended succession  of  continuous  and  connected  particular 
experiences  seems  impossible  unless  a  future  is  implied 
at  every  stage  in  that  experience  taken  as  a  whole.  Our 
aims  and  purposes  enter  into  our  present  content  and 
mould  it.  The  actuality  of  the  future  is  implied  as  a 
moving  influence.  In  other  words,  ends  are  at  every 
point,  in  .one  form  or  another,  determining  factors,  and 
we  bring  in  again  the  teleology  which  Bergson  would 
exclude,  but  in  a  form  in  which  it  is  freed  from  the 
spatiaiising  tendency  to  which  he  objects. 

As  to  what  time  really  means,  other  questions  arise,  of 
a  character  different  from  those  which  we  discussed  in 
connection  with  physical  relativity  in  measurement. 
Finite  experience  seems  to  be  inseparable  from  a  temporal 
element  of  some  sort.  And  yet  if  time  be  final,  even  to 
the  extent  in  which  a  temporal  element  characterises  the 
space-time  continuum,  then  unless  that  continuum  itself 
is  no  more  than  a  conception  appropriate  only  to  a  stage 
in  reality,  there  can  be  no  completed  whole,  such  as  is  the 
ideal  towards  which  we  aspire  in  our  experience  and  our 
abstract  knowledge  alike.  Time  is  real  for  the  finite 
individual  who  as  an  object  in  experience  is  in  it.  But 
he  appears  to  be  the  expression,  even  in  this  his  finiteness, 
of  an  entirety  more  perfect ;  within  which  he  and  time 
alike  fall,  and  in  which  time  itself  is  completed  and 
absorbed.  It  belongs  to  our  "  That."  Away  from  it  we 
cannot  get.  Yet  conceptual  thought  points  to  it  as  being 
rather  a  moment  in  a  whole  within  which  it  falls,  than 
what  can  be  expressed  in  terms  of  itself  alone.  Otherwise 
knowledge  and  experience  would  seem  to  be  unintelligible, 
relating  as  they  do  past,  present,  and  future,  in  a  fashion 
such  that  each  mutually  implies  the  other.  Here  again 
the  principle  of  standpoints  comes  in. 

Bergson's  duration  represented  as  final  reality,  and 
Mr.  Bradley's  Absolute,  in  which  thought  is  to  coincide 
with  feeling  in  what  is  different  from  both,  thus  seem  to 
present  obscurities  that  are  analogous.  The  difficulty 
that  each  conception  raises  is  the  inevitable  question  how 
it  has  been  reached.  In  both  cases,  the  conception  must 
be  attained  through  knowledge.  How,  then,  can  it  in  its 
nature  transcend  knowledge  ?  Is  it  not  more  natural  to 
say  that  the  forms  in  which  we  know  are  limitless,  and 


316  REALISM  AND   IDEALISM 

that  knowledge  can  by  their  aid  transcend,  not  merely 
mechanism,  but  the  reflection  that  is  relational  in  so  far 
as  it  throws  its  objects  into  the  separation  that  is  distinctive 
of  judgments  of  the  understanding  ?  It  may  even  be  that 
something  tacitly  resembling  the  intellectualism  of  a  larger 
order,  which  became  the  instrument  of  idealism  after  the 
time  of  Kant,  has  really  been  reintroduced  by  Bergson 
and  Bradley  alike,  though  in  different  forms,  both 
directed  to  the  overthrow  of  the  doctrine  which  Kant 
bequeathed. 

I  will  now  turn  to  some  points  in  Bergson's  doctrine 
which  have  been  the  subject  of  keen  criticism. 


CHAPTER    XIV 

AN   AMERICAN   CRITICISM   OF   BERGSON 

M.  BERGSON  has  done  a  great  deal  towards  bringing  out 
what  is  inherent  in  the  character  of  experience.  But  if 
the  history  of  philosophy  in  the  nineteenth  century  has 
established  anything  it  has  shown  that  he  has  hardly  done 
enough.  He  might  himself  prove  to  be  very  ready  to 
admit  this.  He  does  not  claim  to  have  given  to  the 
world  any  complete  or  exhaustive  system  of  philosophy. 
His  utterances  are  characterised  not  only  by  grace  of 
expression,  but  by  a  modesty  which  is  distinctive  of  the 
man  and  of  his  standpoint.  In  this  respect  he  is  wholly 
unlike  Schopenhauer. 

In  a  recent  book,  L'Energie  Spirituelle,  which  Professor 
Wildon  Carr  has  translated,  under  the  title  Mind-Energy, 
in  a  style  which  is  as  distinguished  for  excellence  as  it  is 
characterised  by  affectionate  reverence  for  the  author 
and  his  great  qualities,  Bergson  makes  clear  his  standpoint. 
He  holds  that  there  is  no  principle  from  which  the  solution 
of  the  great  problems  can  be  exhaustively  deduced.  Yet 
the  actual  facts  are  indicative  of  converging  directions. 
What  the  lines  of  facts  converge  towards  is  the  conclusion 
that  philosophy  can  no  longer  be  the  work  of  any  single 
thinker.  It  must  increasingly  call  for  corrections  and 
retouches  ;  for  progress,  like  positive  science,  and,  like 
that,  for  work  of  collaboration. 

But  M.  Bergson  does  not,  so  at  least  it  seems  to  me, 
free  himself  from  the  dominating  influence  of  a  single 
principle.  He  is  held  by  a  view  of  the  character  of  reality 
which  will  not  let  him  escape  from  it,  admirable  as  is  his 
open-mindedness.  It  appears  to  confine  him  closely. 
Let  us  see  where  it  appears  to  make  him  fall  short  in  his 
treatment  of  reality. 

If  thought  includes  the  whole  activity  of  mind,  practical 
22  317 


318       AN  AMERICAN  CRITICISM   OF  BERGSON 

as  well  as  theoretical,  there  does  not  appear  to  be  any 
sharp  line  of  demarcation  to  be  drawn  between  thought 
and  other  moments  that  disclose  themselves  in  the  con- 
stitution of  experience.  It  is  present  in  all  phases  of  that 
experience,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  apart  from  and  outside 
them  it  cannot  work  nor  even  possess  meaning.  When 
we  think  abstractly  it  is  in  images  and  metaphors.  What 
is  out  there  before  me  has  significance  and  is  for  me 
real  only  in  so  far  as  I  interpret  it.  But  even  when  I 
try  to  think  most  abstractly  I  never  get  away  from  the 
actual  or,  from  what  for  this  purpose  is  the  same  thing, 
images  of  the  actual.  Meaning  is  everything,  but  then 
there  must  always  be  that  which  expresses  the  meaning. 
We  separate  the  meaning  from  its  embodiment  just 
because  of  our  tendency  to  conceive  mind  as  a  subject 
apart  confronted  by  an  object  that  exists  independently 
of  it.  Finding  that  this  is  so,  we  tend  to  come  to  what 
critics  of  Green  have  pronounced  to  have  been  with  him 
a  timeless  self,  or  an  absolute  as  a  totum  simul,  or  an 
object  which  has  its  reality  only  in  its  relations.  But, 
then,  what  if  there  be  no  aloofness  between  percipient 
and  perceived  ?  The  simple  way  of  looking  at  things,  the 
way  of  the  ordinary  man,  does  not  suggest  much  aloofness. 
He  thinks  of  himself  as  an  individual  person,  a  mind, 
existing  in  a  definite  part  of  space  and  time,  and  confronted 
and  surrounded  by  an  environment  which  controls  him, 
and  which  consists  largely  of  other  minds  and  their  work. 
From  his  sense  of  his  position  in  society  and  the  common- 
wealth, down  to  his  relation  to  his  wife  and  children,  he 
feels  that  he  exists  in  and  through  this  environment,  and 
that  it  is  not  foreign  to  him.  It  is  only  by  reflection,  that 
is  to  say  by  abstraction,  that  he  detaches  himself  from  it 
even  in  thought.  Solidarity  with  his  intimate  surround- 
ings is  of  the  nature  of  his  very  life.  It  is  only  within 
this  solidarity  and  as  based  on  it  that  he  draws  the  line, 
which  is  always  provisional  and  for  a  purpose,  between 
himself  and  what  is  not  himself.  The  foundation  for  him 
of  all  reality  is  just  his  experience,  in  the  wide  sense  in 
which  it  includes  his  whole  mental  content,  interpreted  in 
the  various  meanings  by  the  light  of  which  he  reads  it, 
and  which  impart  to  it  a  significance  which  is  more 
than  individual.  But  this  experience  includes  time  and 
space.  It  is  true,  as  Bergson  has  pointed  out  with  great 


THE    FUNCTION    OF    KNOWLEDGE  319 

force,  that  these  terms  are  ambiguous.  We  spatialise 
our  images  of  time  unduly.  The  elemental-time  experi- 
ence, apart  from  the  distorting  influence  of  reflection 
about  it,  is  rather  of  the  character  of  unbroken  continuity 
or  flow,  analogous  to  the  world-line  already  discussed, 
than  of  a  succession  of  independent  items  in  a  series.  But 
the  moment  we  begin  to  reflect  we  begin  to  separate 
present  from  past  and  future,  and  to  erect  what  we  speak 
of  as  present  into  something  which  is  present  existence 
and  is  fixed  as  such  by  reflection ;  as  contained  in  a 
duration,  no  doubt,  and  not  within  a  mathematical  moment. 
Now  without  reflection  there  cannot  be  that  human 
experience  which  is  the  only  experience  we  have,  and  the 
result  is  that  time  begins  at  once  to  possess  a  significance 
which,  if  secondary,  is  highly  developed.  Past  and 
future  are  held  together  with  the  present,  and  we  have 
to  recognise  that  as  a  condition  of  our  experience  it  must 
in  some  sense  be  more  than  what  is  immersed  in  the 
current  of  spatialised  time.  In  no  other  way  can  we 
make  intelligible  the  experience  of  the  past  in  relation  to 
the  present.  But  this  does  not  of  necessity  imply  that 
the  basis  of  personality  is  a  timeless  self.  When  I  look 
back  and  recall  what  I  did  and  felt  thirty  years  ago  I  am 
holding  together  and  comparing  past  with  present.  But 
it  is  my  past  experience,  emotional  as  well  as  cognitive, 
that  I  am  comparing  with  what  I  have  now.  The 
experiencer  has  changed  continuously  and  in  detail,  as 
well  as  the  experienced.  Although  from  one  point  of  view 
it  is  the  same  self  that  has  felt  and  known  throughout, 
there  has  been,  from  another  standpoint,  a  time  process 
for  the  self  as  well  as  for  the  not-self.  But  this  time 
process  has  been  a  time  process  none  the  less  for  a  self 
that  in  an  essential  fashion  appears  to  have  overreached 
time  as  a  factor  or  moment  in  its  totality,  but  only  as  a 
factor  or  moment.  The  actual  self  is,  in  an  aspect  which 
is  a  necessity  in  its  constitution,  at  once  present,  past,  and 
even  future.  None  the  less  time  is  neither  external  to  it 
nor  its  creature.  The  foundational  basis  of  knowledge 
and  experience  is  an  experience  which  presents  itself  as 
at  once  in  time  and  out  of  it.  That  is  why  experience 
cannot  be  conceived  as  a  thing  or  even  as  an  event. 
But  why  should  we  seek  to  conceive  what  is  foundational 
by  the  analogy  of  anything  but  itself?  Its  only  appro- 


320      AN  AMERICAN   CRITICISM   OF  BERGSON 

priate  terms  are  its  own  terms.  We  must  not  think  of 
consciousness  as  a  property,  the  consciousness  of  a  person. 
The  person  is  consciousness.  He  is  essentially  activity 
and  process,  but  it  is  activity  and  process  aware  of  them- 
selves and  existing  only  in  this  awareness,  an  awareness 
within  which  all  distinctions,  including  that  between  real 
and  unreal,  arise.  In  other  words  consciousness  is  im- 
plicitly self -consciousness,  and  is  fragmentary  and  incom- 
plete when  conceived  otherwise. 

Now  if  this  be  true  the  difficulty  in  regard  to  time  has 
arisen  because  time  has  been  inadequately  conceived. 
The  view  of  time  as  a  succession  of  discrete  units,  as 
what  Bergson  has  called  mathematical  time,  is  no  more 
adequate  to  its  nature  than  is  the  view  of  it  as  a  mere 
empty  or  blind  continuum,  flowing  on  unbroken  and 
uninfluenced  by  ends  or  purposes.  But  if  time  is  only  one 
factor,  although  one  logically  essential,  in  that  under- 
lying activity  of  the  self  apart  from  which  the  universe 
has  no  meaning  for  us,  then  its  relation  to  ends  to  be 
realised  and  to  organisation  in  the  interest  of  these  ends 
becomes  intelligible.  If  time  falls  within  mind  and  does 
not  lie  outside  it,  it  may  be  properly  regarded  as  a  principle 
through  which  the  self  organises  its  content,  and  not  as  a 
mere  succession  of  disconnected  events  external  to  each 
other. 

I  find  myself  in  agreement  on  this  point  with  some 
things  written  by  the  American  thinker  whom  I  have 
already  quoted,  Professor  Watts  Cunningham,  both  in 
his  Philosophy  of  Bergson  and  in  an  essay  on  "  Coherence 
as  Organisation,"  published  in  a  recent  volume  of  Philo- 
sophical Essays  by  American  Writers.1  After  criticising 
the  contracted  view  of  intellectualism  which,  influenced 
by  Kant's  restriction  of  the  table  of  categories,  character- 
ises Bergson's  writing,  Professor  Cunningham  points  out 
the  value  of  the  enlarged  conception  of  temporalism  which 
Bergson  has  introduced.  Time  is,  he  holds,  fundamental 
in  reality. 

"  For  my  part,"  he  says,  in  concluding  his  book  on 
Bergson,  "  I  must  confess  myself  unable  to  see  how  it 
can  legitimately  be  denied  that  intellectualism  logically 

1  Philosophical  Essays  in  honour  of  James  Edward  Creighton,  New 
York,  The  Macmillan  Company,  1917. 


PROFESSOR    CUNNINGHAM    AGAIN  821 

involves  some  form  of  temporalism,  and  by  temporalism 
I  mean  the  doctrine  that  time  is  genuinely  predicable  of 
reality.  For  it  certainly  is  not  easy  to  understand  how 
it  would  be  possible  for  the  universe  to  meet  the  demands 
of  intelligence  if  the  universe  were  in  its  essence  static 
and  pulseless  and  rigid.  If  intelligence  demands  anything 
of  the  universe  at  all,  it  would  seem  to  demand  that 
there  be  room  enough  there  for  its  teleological  categories 
to  bud  and  grow.  Surely  there  is  no  necessary  inconsis- 
tency between  an  intelligible  universe  and  a  temporal 
universe  ;  in  so  far  as  Bergson  and  the  anti-intellectualist 
propagandists  generally  assume  the  contrary  they  really 
assume  the  main  point  at  issue.  Nor,  on  the  other  hand, 
are  we  driven  to  the  conclusion  that  a  reality  of  which 
time  is  predicable  is  ipso  facto  subject  to  blind  and  irre- 
sponsible chance.  A  growing  and  changing  reality,  not- 
withstanding the  fact  that  it  is  dynamic,  may  nevertheless 
be  systematic  ;  in  so  far  as  intellectualists  tend  to  deny 
that  such  is  conceivable  they  apparently  base  their 
contention  upon  the  assumptions  of  that  type  of  intel- 
lectualism  which  they  themselves  not  only  admit,  but 
insist,  is  outgrown.  The  principles  of  true  intellectualism 
seem  to  me  to  be  no  more  consistent  with  a  sterile  abso- 
lutism than  they  are  with  an  erratic  creative  evolution ; 
they  rather  demand  of  the  real  that  it  be  a  process — a 
process  in  which  ends  are  potent,  and  in  which  these 
ends  are  themselves  dynamic  and  evolving." 

In  the  essay  to  which  I  have  referred  Professor  Cun- 
ningham carries  his  criticism  into  the  camp  of  such 
idealists  as  hold  mere  logical  consistency  to  be  an  adequate 
conception  of  truth.  He  quotes  with  approval  Professor 
Sabine's  question  whether  : 

"  If  truth  is  the  whole  and  if  totality  is  the  ultimate 
principle  of  individuality  and  value,  and  if  thought  is 
just  the  nisus  of  experience  towards  its  completeness, 
what  is  this  more  perfect  experience  to  which  judgment 
is  not  the  key  ?  Is  it  altogether  perverse  to  suspect  that 
the  defect  is  not  in  the  relational  form  of  judgment,  but 
in  the  coherence  theory  of  truth  ?  Is  it  not  really 
probable  that  the  concrete  universal  is  an  inadequate 
logical  principle  ?  " 


822       AN  AMERICAN  CRITICISM   OF  BERGSON 

To  the  question  so  put  Professor  Cunningham  offers  an 
answer : 

"  If  the  coherence  theory  is  to  be  saved,  the  transcen- 
dental principle  of  unity  within  experience  upon  which 
it  insists,  and  which  it  calls  '  thought '  or  '  reason,'  must 
be  brought  definitely  into  touch  with  the  concrete  situa- 
tions in  which  it  is  supposed  to  function,  and  must  be 
so  defined  as  to  imply  an  intelligible  view  of  the  temporal 
order  ;  in  short,  that  coherence  must  be  so  construed  as 
to  place  the  emphasis  on  organisation  of  ends  rather 
than  mere  abstract  logical  consistency." 

He  thinks  that  the  coherence  theory  was  in  its  origin 
a  reaction  against  Hume's  atomism,  and  that  Kant's 
counter-theory  of  the  transcendental  unity  of  apperception, 
with  its  emphasis  on  system  as  the  criterion  of  meaning, 
was  the  origin  of  the  coherence  doctrine.  The  attack  on 
the  doctrine  by  the  pragmatists  is  directed,  not  so  much 
against  the  general  insistence  on  system  and  unity  within 
experience,  as  against  the  sort  of  unity  postulated.  For 
if  the  unifying  principle  is  to  be  taken  as  an  immanently 
constitutional  and  organisational  reason,  which  holds 
over  from  one  moment  of  experience  to  the  next,  and  is 
in  this  way  transcendental  in  the  Kantian  sense,  the 
conception  lays  itself  open  to  two  objections.  First  of  all 
the  unity  so  posited  is  too  far  removed  from,  and  too 
externally  related  to,  the  concrete  instances  in  which  it 
is  supposed  to  operate,  and  is  no  more  than  a  form  or 
mode  of  some  supra-empirical  ego.  The  true  doctrine, 
say  the  critics  to  whom  Professor  Cunningham  is  referring, 
is  that  only  the  relevant  can  be  true,  and  that  the  relevant 
must  always  be  relevant  to  a  purpose.  Then  again,  the 
principle  of  unity  assumed  by  the  coherence  theory  fails 
to  do  justice  to  the  sort  of  unity  which  is  actually  found 
within  concrete  experience.  As  a  matter,  these  critics 
say,  of  indisputable  fact,  experience  grows  in  time,  and  as 
a  result  involves  a  considerable  degree  of  discontinuity 
and  hesitancy ;  but  the  unity  posited  by  the  coherence 
theory  is  timeless,  and  therefore  the  theory  fails  to  discover 
any  ultimate  significance  in  the  temporal  order.  Temporal 
discreteness  seems  on  the  face  of  it  to  have  little  to  do 
with  abstract  consistency.  In  short  the  coherence  theory 


THE    COHERENCE    THEORY  323 

is  incompetent  to  account  for  the  reality  of  the  time 
order,  and  implies  that  ultimately  the  temporal  must  be 
transcended  as  belonging  to  an  inherently  imperfect  type  of 
experience  which  cannot  be  regarded  as  of  ultimate  worth. 

As  against  Kant,  Professor  Cunningham  agrees  with 
this  criticism.  Kant  only  substitutes  another  abstraction 
for  that  of  Hume,  an  abstraction  which  is  in  reality  wholly 
separated  from  time.  But  following  out  his  own  inter- 
pretation of  Hegel  in  another  book  which  he  has  written 
on  Thought  and  Reality  in  TLegeVs  System,  Professor 
Cunningham  presses  the  point  that  Hegel  and  the  Neo- 
Hegelians  have  sought  to  define  thought  in  terms  more 
concrete  than  those  of  Kant,  and  to  bring  the  transcen- 
dental element  within  experience  into  more  direct  and 
vital  contact  with  the  concrete  empirical  situations  in 
which  it  is  meant  to  function. 

In  saying  this  Professor  Cunningham  seems  to  be  well 
founded.  There  is  a  remarkable  passage  in  Hegel's 
Phenomenology ',  to  which  he  does  not  refer,  but  which 
forms  part  of  a  criticism  of  those  who  underrate  the 
significance  of  time,  a  criticism  which  confirms  Professor 
Cunningham's  view.  This  passage  has  already  been 
quoted  at  p.  60.  Hegel,  as  is  at  last  beginning  to  be 
understood,  did  not  aim  at  deducing  objective  reality 
from  thought,  the  That  from  the  What.  The  distinction 
between  these  fell  for  him  within  experience,  not  outside 
it.  Pure  feeling  and  pure  thought  were  alike  abstractions 
arising  within  the  living  content  of  ever-active  self- 
consciousness,  and  owed  their  existence  to  that  activity. 
The  content  of  consciousness,  or  experience,  was,  on  the 
one  hand,  no  mere  succession  of  isolated  and  mutually 
exclusive  units.  On  the  other  hand,  it  was  not  the  con- 
struction of  thinking  alone.  Nature  and  Logic  were 
abstract  aspects  for  reflection  of  the  actuality  to  be  looked 
for  in  mind  taken  in  the  widest  sense.  Mathematical 
methods  are  accordingly  for  Hegel  never  wholly  adequate 
to  the  real.  Time  is  the  general  counter-aspect  in  nature 
which  corresponds  to  the  activity  of  thought  itself  regarded 
in  abstraction,  and  the  essence  of  time  is  continuous  change. 
The  temporal  order  has  thus  a  significance  to  which  the 
abstract  form  of  the  coherence  theory  does  scant  justice. 
Professor  Cunningham  points  this  out.  He  declares  that 
the  temporal  aspect  of  experience  is  fundamental  and  is 


324      AN  AMERICAN  CRITICISM   OF  BERGSON 

basic.  The  form  of  the  systematic  unity  of  human 
experience  must  accordingly  be  restated,  and  he  suggests, 
as  against  Bergson  and  the  adherents  of  the  purely 
logical  principle  of  the  coherence  doctrine  alike,  that  the 
latter  must  be,  not  abandoned,  but  restated  as  one  of 
organisation  of  ends.  But  such  an  organisation  of  ends 
can  only  be  stated  as  a  system.  This  brings  us  back  to 
the  value  of  ends  with  their  standards,  and  in  that  form  to 
rationality.  For  truth  is  the  expression  of  system. 
Can  the  doctrine  that  the  truth  is  the  whole,  and  the  test 
of  coherence  to  which  it  leads,  be  accepted  ?  Professor 
Cunningham  thinks  that  this  question  may  properly  be 
answered  in  the  affirmative,  provided  that  thought  is 
recognised  as  possessing  certain  fundamental  character- 
istics. In  the  first  place  it  must  be  interpreted  as  that 
in  experience  which  includes  the  various  so-called  states 
of  consciousness,  both  cognitive  and  emotional.  Thought 
is  no  event  over  against  any  form  of  experience,  practical 
or  theoretical,  but  the  very  principle  of  organisation 
through  which  the  forms  of  experience  are  a  unitary 
whole  and  belong  to  a  single  experience.  In  the  second 
place  it  is  characteristic  of  thought  to  hold  over  from  one 
moment  of  experience  to  another.  For  it  is  a  principle 
and  not  an  event,  and  its  essence  is  to  be  past,  present, 
and  future  at  once.  Although  the  time  order  is  a  funda- 
mental feature  of  experience,  yet  thought  overreaches 
throughout  it,  and  by  doing  so  renders  possible  the  con- 
tinuity of  past,  present,  and  future.  Thus  even  the  ends 
which  govern  the  action  of  the  individual  may  originate 
in  his  past  history.  In  the  third  place,  inasmuch  as 
thought  includes  successive  moments,  it  cannot  itself  be 
said  to  belong  to  any  one  moment.  It  cannot  be  static, 
but  is  always  self-evolving,  and  is  a  principle  which  takes 
the  form  of  a  temporal  process  of  experimentation,  trial, 
and  error.  In  so  far  as  the  current  coherence  theory 
tends  to  destroy  the  significance  of  time  Professor  Cun- 
ningham cannot  agree  with  it.  For  truth,  as  it  has 
meaning  for  us,  is  concerned  with  a  present  concrete 
experience,  which  is  both  discontinuous  and  continuous, 
and  is  therefore  temporal.  The  criterion  of  truth  as 
logical  consistency  is  for  him  in  reality  a  progressive 
co-ordination  of  ends,  so  that  the  criterion  is  not  really 
separable  from  reference  to  a  temporal  stream.  Finally, 


THE    CHARACTER    OF    EXPERIENCE          325 

thought  cannot  be  regarded  as  "  a  mere  conscious  state 
existent  within  some  particular  psychological  history." 
It  is  rather  to  be  found  "  chiefly  in  the  physical  and  social 
orders,  in  the  world-process  itself."  Of  course  thought 

"  exists  in  psychological  experience,  but  then  we  must 
regard  it  as  something  gradually  to  be  attained,  as  an 
acquisition  and  not  as  an  endowment,  a  progressive 
process  of  creative  effort  which  matures  only  through 
contact  with  the  objective  order,  and  which  becomes 
aware  of  its  own  fundamental  nature  through  its  unfolding. 
In  short  thought  must  be  said  to  have  its  habitat  primarily 
in  the  objective  order  and  only  secondarily  in  the  indi- 
vidual." 

Such  a  view,  says  Professor  Cunningham,  will  of  course 
be  attacked  as  bringing  back  the  trans-experiential 
elements  of  the  old  coherence  theory.  But  he  replies 
that  if  there  be  one  lesson  which  the  history  of  philosophical 
inquiry  from  the  time  of  the  Sophists  down  to  the  present 
has  taught  us  with  unmistakable  certainty,  that  lesson 
is  that  a  theory  of  truth  which  seeks  its  criterion  in 
merely  subjective  experience  ends  at  last  in  giving  us 
no  criterion  at  all.  The  failure  to  recognise  this  has  been 
fatal  to  pragmatism.  It  is  true  that  so  far  as  the  various 
"  states "  of  consciousness  are  concerned  they  exist 
nowhere  outside  of  a  psychological  experience.  This  is 
the  case  with  feeling  in  its  various  forms.  But  is  it  true 
in  the  same  sense  of  rationality  ?  My  reason  exists  in 
my  own  individual  mind,  but  it  is  not  less  true  that  it 
transcends  my  experiential  limitations.  "  In  order  to 
identify  ourselves  with  objective  rationality  there  is  no 
obligation  imposed  on  us  to  lift  ourselves  by  our  own 
bootstraps."  To  be  rational  is  just  to  be  identified  with 
the  objective  order  of  the  universe.  "  Surely  science 
exists  in  no  man's  mind,  but  surely,  also,  every  lowest  son 
of  Adam  is  in  some  sense  capable  of  science."  Otherwise, 
and  if  reason  were  not  supra-psychological,  the  whole 
history  of  scientific  achievement  were  utterly  inscrutable, 
and,  for  that  matter,  the  whole  history  of  society  and  even 
of  the  individual  himself. 

"  Thought,  upon  which  the  coherence  theory  lays  so 


826      AN  AMERICAN   CRITICISM   OF  BERGSON 

much  emphasis,  must  not  be  supposed  to  be  an  abstract 
principle,  standing  over  against  the  various  states  of 
consciousness,  which  it  somehow  mechanically  and  mys- 
teriously binds  together.  Rather  must  it  be  conceived 
as  the  principle  of  organisation  through  which  these 
states  exist,  as  they  do  exist,  and  which,  because  it  is  a 
principle,  is  more  than  these  states  taken  either  dis- 
tributively  or  collectively.  Once  again,  because  it  is  a 
principle  of  organisation  within  experience,  it  must  hold 
over  from  one  moment  to  another ;  on  the  other  hand,  it 
is  not  non-temporal  and  cannot  be  so  conceived,  since 
organisation  ipso  facto  involves  time.  To  speak  of  a 
timeless  act  of  thought,  as  Green  does,  is  a  contradiction 
in  terms,  if  thought  is  taken  in  the  sense  here  insisted  on. 
Finally,  thought  is  not  a  process  which  is  confined  wholly 
to  an  individual  biography,  as  is  a  feeling  of  pleasure  or 
a  particular  desire  ;  thought  is  rather  the  principle  of 
objectivity  which  spans  the  gulf  between  the  individual 
and  the  world." 

Such  a  view  of  the  real  application  of  the  coherence 
theory  meets,  for  Professor  Cunningham,  the  difficulty  of 
the  supposed  abstractness  of  the  theory.  For  rational 
organisation  of  this  kind  belongs  to  concrete  experience. 
It  is  the  determination  of  value  within  a  given  set  of 
circumstances.  "  The  truth  is  the  whole  "  just  means 
that,  under  the  conditions  as  they  are  discovered  to  be, 
the  true  is  that  which  complies  with  the  demand  of  experi- 
ence for  rational  unity.  The  pragmatist  who  says  that 
only  the  relevant  is  true,  and  that  relevant  means  relative 
to  a  purpose,  is  right  enough  so  far  as  he  goes.  But 
idealism  does  not  stop  where  he  stops.  It  goes  further 
and  offers  a  standard  by  which  the  varying  degrees  of 
relevancy  may  be  judged.  Mere  isolated  desires  and 
interests  are  logically  valueless  ;  what  is  essential  is  the 
standard  of  an  organised  whole  in  which  these  desires  and 
interests  have  their  places.  The  problem  which  arises  is 
more  than  one  of  mere  logical  coherency.  Reason  cannot 
be  defined  in  isolation  from  concrete  experience.  To 
quote  Professor  Bosanquet, 

"  For  thought  which  has  become  expert  in  this  world, 
such  media  as  sound,  colour,  form,  rhythm,  the  sound 


TIME  827 

that  with  other  sounds  satisfies  the  educated  ear,  the 
colour  that  is  demanded  by  a  colour  scheme,  are,  I  take 
it,  as  necessary  and  rational  as  the  conclusion  of  a 
syllogism." 

It  is  a  mistake,  according  to  Professor  Cunningham, 
arising  from  the  abstract  form  in  which  the  coherence 
doctrine  has  been  put  forward,  to  say  that  teleology  is 
an  inadequate  category,  and  that  what  is  novel  is  in  last 
analysis  unintelligible  ;  in  other  words,  that  the  real  is 
timeless,  and  the  temporal  order  mere  appearance.  If 
experience  could  be  conceived  as  that  in  which  disruption 
and  selection  could  not  occur,  organisation,  which  is 
based  on  selection,  could  not  be  predicated  of  it.  Such 
an  experience  would  be  merely  static.  A  timeless  Absolute 
is  thus  excluded.  The  temporal  alone  is  intelligible. 

I  have  quoted  Professor  Cunningham's  bold  pronounce- 
ment at  some  length,  because  I  think  it  is  one  which 
raises  important  matters  for  consideration.  In  the  first 
place  it  embodies  the  tendencies  of  a  new  school  of  idealism 
which  is  growing  up  in  the  United  States,  and  which  con- 
tains a  number  of  thinkers  distinguished  alike  by  freshness 
of  outlook  and  by  comparative  youth.  In  the  second 
place  this  interpretation  of  idealism  is  based  on  a  careful 
study  of  Hegel  as  well  as  of  Bergson.  The  claim  to  have 
brought  near  to  each  other  the  conclusions  of  those  two 
thinkers  is  an  impressive  one.  Has  it  been  successfully 
asserted  ? 

In  a  considerable  measure  I  think  that  it  has.  Judged 
by  a  very  important  test,  that  of  conformity  to  experienced 
fact,  what  is  suggested  seems  to  bring  us  nearer  to  the 
actual  in  life  than  does  the  doctrine  which  reduces  mathe- 
matical time  to  appearance.  Of  course  the  acceptance  of 
time  as  a  genuine  form  of  reality  is  attended  with  diffi- 
culties. But  these  appear  to  arise  from  misconception. 
If  time  be  regarded  in  the  light  in  which  Hegel  himself 
regards  it  in  the  passage  quoted  earlier  from  his  Pheno- 
menology, the  difficulties  are  less.  For  time,  as  he  there 
describes  its  essence,  is  no  more  mere  mathematical  time 
than  is  the  duration  of  Bergson.  It  is  not  exclusively 
discrete  any  more  than  it  is  exclusively  continuous. 
Because  it  is  the  counter-abstraction  to  the  movement  of 
thought  of  which  the  characteristic  is  the  combination 


828      AN  AMERICAN   CRITICISM   OF   BERGSON 

of  identity  with  difference,  it  is  both  continuous  and 
discrete.  Now  in  time  conceived  mathematically  the 
stress  is  mainly  laid  on  the  second  of  these  aspects,  and 
it  is  not  pointed  out  that  each  is  itself  an  abstraction 
which  necessitates  the  other,  just  as  difference  necessitates 
identity. 

Then  between  time  taken  abstractly  and  the  thinking 
of  which  it  is  the  counter-abstraction  a  gulf  is  fixed, 
illegitimately,  if  Hegel  is  right.  Things  cannot  for  him 
be  divorced  from  thoughts,  or  thoughts  from  things.  In 
mind,  which  is  in  its  nature  always  concrete  experience, 
the  two  appear  as  moments  which  have  reality  there  alone. 
They  are  not  things  apart.  They  are  simply  diverse 
aspects  of  the  real,  and  as  abstractions  they  pass  over 
into  each  other,  excepting  in  so  far  as  the  reflective 
activity  of  mind  can  hold  them  apart. 

Now  this  view  ought  not  to  be  a  startling  one.  We 
have  already  seen  its  truth  exemplified  in  the  case  of 
biology.  There  the  relations  of  mechanism  are  superseded 
by  those  of  development  in  fulfilment  of  an  end.  Not 
only  is  the  externality  of  the  parts  into  which  space  is 
resoluble  overcome,  but  the  succession  of  events  in  time 
is  likewise  overreached  by  ends  which  do  not  appear  as 
separate  events  in  time,  and  which  yet  control  and  mould 
the  significance  of  such  events.  In  the  organism  the  whole 
exists  in  the  members  and  is  everywhere  present  in  them, 
overcoming  their  externality  to  each  other  in  space  as 
well  as  in  time,  and  endowing  them  with  life  and  meaning. 
In  the  organism  there  is  manifest  a  development  from 
birth  to  death,  a  development,  too,  controlled  in  the 
interests  of  the  species  to  which  the  individual  belongs. 
The  end  governs  in  these  respects  also,  just  as  it  supersedes 
the  relationship  of  externality.  Here  the  end  is  no 
external  force  or  event.  It  is  simply  the  fundamental 
character  of  the  phenomenon,  a  character  which  endures 
through  succession  and  change  and  is  present  throughout 
their  course,  moulding  the  development  to  its  own  purpose. 
There  is  apparent  discontinuity  at  moments,  there  is 
accident,  there  is  the  contingency  inseparable  from 
externality.  But  the  tendency  remains  unfaltering. 
There  is  no  whole  as  perfect  in  its  entirety  as  is  the  activity 
of  mind,  which  is  explicitly  or  implicitly  present  in  every 
one  of  the  manifestations  to  which  it  gives  reality  and 


TIME    AND    OUR    EXPERIENCE  329 

meaning.  But  the  analogy  of  living  is  much  more  nearly 
that  of  thinking  than  it  is  that  of  mechanism,  with  its 
disjunction  of  external  parts  aggregated  ab  extra.  Both 
in  life  and  in  thought  space  and  time  are  transcended,  in 
the  sense  that,  though  there,  they  are  there  as  moments 
only  in  a  greater  entirety,  which,  inasmuch  as  it  over- 
reaches, transcends  them.  We  live  as  individual  per- 
sonalities amid  and  by  means  of  foreign  material  which 
we  cannot  wholly  control.  Contingency  is  everywhere 
raising  its  head.  We  think  in  images  to  which  we  cannot 
wholly  assign  their  limits  of  validity  in  our  logic.  Our 
life  and  our  thought  and  the  mechanical  appearance 
which  confront  us  are  aspects  of  a  reality  which  include 
them  all  in  its  phases,  the  concrete  experience  which  is 
the  only  reality  that  has  meaning  for  us,  and  in  terms 
of  which  we  must  somehow  interpret  even  what  we  try  to 
conceive  as  lying  beyond  it. 

Such  an  experience  manifests  itself  by  its  very  nature 
at  stages  which  differ  in  their  approach  to  completeness, 
stages  which  I  have  spoken  of  as  degrees  in  truth  and 
reality.  Now  these  stages  do  not,  as  I  have  already 
pointed  out,  necessarily  exist  apart  in  space  or  succeed 
each  other  in  time.  Knowledge  sometimes  begins  with 
the  higher  degree  of  completeness  and  goes  back  to  what 
is  more  abstract  and  so  less  perfect.  When  we  rationalise 
experience  by  reducing  it  to  terms  of  mathematical  formulae 
we  rob  it  of  most  of  its  riches.  But  on  the  other  hand 
we  transcend  the  limits  of  immediacy  in  this  fashion  and 
advance  knowledge.  Moreover,  the  procedure  is  in  harmony, 
so  far  as  it  goes,  with  the  facts.  The  properties  of  straight 
lines  and  perfect  circles  hold  even  of  what  are  the  least 
perfect  exemplifications  of  these  constructions,  that  is  to 
say,  wherever  the  exemplifications  can  be  treated  as 
illustrating  them  they  conform  to  the  properties.  So, 
too,  in  the  case  of  an  organism  its  action  conforms  to 
mechanical  and  chemical  laws.  There  is  no  reason  to 
doubt  that  the  laws,  for  example,  of  the  conservation  and 
degradation  of  energy  apply  to  the  instance  of  an  organism 
just  as  much  as  in  that  of  a  machine.  But  although  this 
phase  is  a  true  one  it  has  been,  like  that  of  the  perfect 
circle,  isolated  by  abstraction,  and  it  does  not  represent 
the  whole  truth.  The  conception  which  the  phase 
exemplifies  is  not  a  complete  conception  or  at  the  highest 


330      AN  AMERICAN   CRITICISM   OF   BERGSON 

possible  degree  of  truth  and  reality.  It  is  the  most  con- 
crete that  is  the  most  real,  and  one  wonders  whether 
certain  general  concepts  among  which  we  seem  to  move 
very  easily,  such  as  those  of  mass,  atoms,  molecules,  and 
energy,  will  not  also  turn  out  to  have  been  mere  abstrac- 
tions inadequate  to  the  reality  of  which  they  purport  to 
be  descriptive.  Instead  of  trying  to  build  up  reality  out 
of  such  supposed  simple  existences,  it  may  be  that  we 
shall  come  to  regard  them  as  aspects,  for  reflection  only, 
of  phenomena  of  a  richer  order,  from  which  they  have 
derived  their  meaning  by  a  process  of  analysis  in  its 
nature  artificial.  When  at  an  earlier  stage  we  were  con- 
sidering the  relation  of  the  environment  to  the  organism, 
we  observed  the  play  of  this  sort  of  abstraction,  and  the 
artificial  view  of  reality  to  which  it  gave  rise.  It  may 
be  that  the  play  of  abstraction  obtains  right  through  that 
realm  of  nature,  and  has  led  us  into  making  distinctions 
that  are  not  in  truth  of  the  hard  and  fast  character  we 
suppose. 

But  this  does  not  of  necessity  imply  that  such  abstrac- 
tion is  error.  It  is  rather  a  necessity  inherent  in  the 
character  of  human  knowledge,  the  inevitable  procedure 
of  a  mind  whose  organ  consists  in  a  human  brain  and 
body.  It  is  the  method  which  characterises  knowledge. 
In  the  chapter  in  the  second  volume  of  his  Logic,  in  which 
Mr.  Bosanquet  discusses  the  coherence  doctrine,  he  speaks 
of  it  as  a  standard  applicable  to  discursive  thought,  but 
a  standard  of  truth  which  itself  does  not  pretend  to  be 
the  perfect  or  all-inclusive  experience.  He  rejects,  as  I 
think  rightly,  the  notion  that  truth  consists  in  the  corre- 
spondence of  an  idea  with  something  external  to  and 
independent  of  it.  That,  as  we  have  seen  earlier,  is  truth 
only  in  a  limited  and  primitive  aspect.  He  places  truth 
as  consisting  rather  in  the  systematic  coherence  of  judg- 
ments which  enter  into  the  very  nature  of  reality.  These 
judgments  profess  to  express  the  nature  of  the  real  so  far 
as  it  can  be  uttered  in  a  system  of  predicates  and  relations. 
Yet,  for  Mr.  Bosanquet,  the  nature  of  the  highest  con- 
ceivable experience  cannot  be  such  a  system  of  predicates 
and  relations.  Thought,  he  holds  with  Mr.  Bradley, 
dissociates  and  so  destroys  any  experience  which  could 
claim  to  be  perfect.  That  is  because  he  takes  thought  to 
be  inherently  relational  and  to  give  us  no  more  than 


PROFESSOR    BOSANQUET  831 

what  is  merely  appearance  as  distinguished  from  reality. 
Yet  reality  is  operative,  for  Mr.  Bosanquet,  in  truth,  and 
in  this  limited  sense  correspondence  results.  The  explana- 
tion is  that  judgment,  which  gives  the  appearance  of 
reality,  but  only  in  the  relational  form,  does  its  best  to 
reach  true  individuality.  It  can  never  do  so  because 
individuality  lies  beyond  that  form.  Perfect  coherence  is 
thus  impossible,  for  the  perfection  of  truth  lies  in  a  reality 
different  in  kind.  Truth  is  no  more  than  a  fulfilment  under 
its  own  conditions  of  the  nature  of  reality.  If  it  be  said 
that  therefore  truth  cannot  be  quite  true,  the  answer  for 
Mr.  Bosanquet  is  that  no  experience  short  of  perfect 
reality  is  ever  quite  itself.  Its  fullest  completeness  lies 
in  a  more  perfect  form  of  experience  which  is  beyond 
itself. 

But  Mr.  Bosanquet  makes  a  reservation  which  appears 
to  me  to  mark  a  departure  from  the  tendency  of 
Mr.  Bradley's  doctrine,  and  to  bring  him  nearer  to  the 
doctrine  of  degrees.  For  he  goes  on  to  say  that  the  worlds 
of  our  experience  have  been  fundamentally  transformed  and 
reconstructed  by  thought,  working  in  and  on  perception 
and  general  experience.  These  worlds  have  their  existence 
and  quality  in  one.  "  Our  worlds  are  all  different,  and 
yet  all  apparently  solid,  and  clothed  in  inseparable  contents, 
which  nevertheless  are  of  our  own  discrimination  and 
attribution."  These  are  not,  as  a  rule,  taken  as  predicates. 
They  are  regarded  rather  as  belongings  of  reality,  although 
we  can  separate  them  and  take  them  as  predicates.  The 
interesting  point  about  the  supposed  individual  subjects 
in  the  judgments  of  such  experience  is  their  relativity. 
Thought  has  made  them,  and  can  unmake  them,  and 
indeed  is  always  remaking  them.  Thus  a  quasi-real 
world  is,  for  Mr.  Bosanquet,  continuously  being  deposited 
as  part  of  the  work  of  thought,  and  thought  is  therefore 
in  itself  not  so  far  removed  from  the  nature  of  a  perfect 
experience  as  the  exclusively  relational  view  would  lead 
us  to  think.  But  this  quasi-real  world  is  of  a  plastic 
nature.  Its  aspects  never  remain  fixed  or  static,  nor 
wholly  cut  off  from  a  fuller  character  of  reality. 

Is  not  this  conclusion  one  that  comes  near  to  that  which 
treats  reality  itself,  as  well  as  our  knowledge,  as  disclosing 
itself  at  a  variety  of  levels  which  form  intelligible  stages 
in  the  logical  progress  of  its  self-development  ?  And  may 


332      AN  AMERICAN   CRITICISM  OF  BERGSON 

not  truth  lie  rather  in  consistency  in  this  development  of 
the  continuity  of  the  logical  progress  from  each  level  to 
the  larger  level  beyond  it,  than  in  the  attainment  of  a 
goal  which  thought  itself  cannot  define  and  which  must 
remain  for  ever  an  ideal  that  cannot  be  realised  ?  If  so, 
it  is  the  striving  that  contains  the  truth,  the  truth  of 
quality.  And  the  ultimate  reality  is  just  what  is  expressed 
in  the  reality  of  this  striving.  It  is  in  the  world  of  ends 
that  we  must  seek  our  standards.  Was  Hegel,  then,  far 
wrong  when  he  declared  that  within  the  range  of  our 
finiteness  we  could  never  see  or  experience  that  the  end 
had  been  really  secured,  but  that  the  consummation  of  the 
infinite  end  lay  in  the  removal  of  the  illusion  which  made 
it  seem  unaccomplished,  an  illusion  which  our  finiteness 
has  created  ?  If  this  be  the  case,  then,  that  there  should 
be  progressive  supersession  of  error  is  essential  to  what 
is  no  static  attitude,  but  a  dynamic  process. 


CHAPTER    XV 

THE    HEGELIAN    PRINCIPLE 

WE  have  seen  how  the  caution  of  Kant  led  him  to  stop 
before  electing  which  of  two  further  paths  he  would 
follow.  But  his  system  could  not  remain  as  incomplete 
as  he  left  it.  Schopenhauer  and  Bergson  chose  a  path 
which  led  far  from  where  Kant  finally  stood.  For  they 
both  entered  on  the  pursuit  of  what  seemed  to  be 
analogous  to  that  thing-in-itself  the  nature  of  which  Kant 
had  declared  to  be  impenetrable  for  knowledge.  But  it 
was  not  on  knowledge  that  either  of  them  professed  to 
rely  as  the  instrument  for  penetrating  to  things-in-them- 
selves.  It  was  on  direct  awareness.  Schopenhauer  found 
this  in  the  immediate  sense  we  have  in  our  own  bodies 
of  the  reality  of  will.  Bergson  found  it  in  a  not  dissimilar 
direct  awareness  of  a  foundational  activity  which  he  calls 
durSe  or  6lan,  or  creative  activity,  but  he  did  not  lay 
the  emphasis  that  the  former  did  on  bodily  sense  of  direct 
intuition. 

Over  both  forms  of  this  post-Kantian  development  the 
critics  have  been  active.  By  whatever  name  we  call 
direct  awareness,  or  however  we  describe  it,  it  is  insisted 
that  what  it  yields  in  the  hands  of  Schopenhauer  and 
Bergson  alike  is  what  is  obviously  in  truth  knowledge, 
and  much  more  than  any  mere  passive  awareness.  From 
the  former  we  hear  a  great  deal  about  the  inherent  char- 
acter of  will,  and  also  about  its  modes  and  grades  of  self- 
manifestation.  By  the  latter  we  are  told  much  of 
scientific  detail  about  the  creative  activity  and  how  it 
operates.  Of  time  we  learn  not  merely  that  it  is,  but  a 
good  deal  about  what  it  is. 

The  result  is  that,  not  only  the  American  criticism  to 
which  I  have  referred,  but  also  criticism  in  the  Old  World, 
23  333 


334  THE  HEGELIAN   PRINCIPLE 

has  pressed  the  view  that  the  attempt  to  supply  the 
role  of  knowledge  by  direct  awareness  has  been  no  more 
of  a  success  than  it  has  been  in  the  parallel  instance 
of  New  Realism.  Unless  we  are  able  to  treat  know- 
ledge as  a  mere  causal  and  accidental  external  relation 
between  entities  wholly  independent  of  it,  it  is  difficult 
to  regard  it  as  having  been  shown  in  any  of  these  versions 
to  be  capable  of  resolution  into  something  anterior  to  itself. 

Even  in  the  years  with  which  the  nineteenth  century 
opened  this  attempt  had  been  made  by  others,  like 
Schelling,  and  had  apparently  failed.  It  resulted  in  the 
end  only  in  what  Hegel  grimly  characterised  as  a  "  night 
in  which  all  cows  look  black."  There  was  therefore  a 
desire  to  probe  afresh  the  ground  examined  by  Kant,  and 
to  see  whether  it  was  really  necessary  to  attribute  to 
knowledge  the  limited  scope  and  significance  which  was 
all  that  Kant  would  permit  to  it.  This  desire  culminated 
in  the  Hegelian  system,  and  about  this  system  it  is 
accordingly  desirable  to  say  something  here,  in  the  hope 
that  it  may  prove  less  misleading  than  some  other  state- 
ments about  its  principles. 

It  is  odd  that  one  should  have  to  begin  to  speak  of 
a  philosophy  by  telling  what  it  was  not,  instead  of  at 
once  stating  what  it  was.  But  this  appears  unavoidable 
in  the  case  of  Hegel.  For  the  habit  of  not  taking  the 
trouble  necessary,  in  this  instance  a  good  deal  of  trouble, 
to  proceed  to  the  source  and  to  master  his  own  version, 
instead  of  trying  to  get  knowledge  of  it  at  second-hand 
or  from  isolated  citations,  has  led  to  extraordinary  con- 
fusion of  ideas.  I  will  begin  by  stating  once  for  all  that 
Hegel  did  not  suggest  that  things  were  created  or  con- 
structed by  our  private  thoughts  about  them. 

Anyone  who  wants  to  verify  this  statement  has  only  to 
turn  to  the  criticism  of  Kant  in  the  account  given  by 
Hegel  of  the  "  Second  Altitude  of  Thought  towards  the 
Objective  World,"  in  the  early  part  of  the  volume  on 
Logic,  in  his  Encyclopedia  of  the  Philosophical  Sciences. 
His  very  purpose,  a  purpose  pursued  undeviatingly,  was 
to  eliminate  the  element  of  subjectivity  with  which  idealism 
had  been  invested  by  Kant.  Nor  did  Hegel  believe,  on  the 
other  hand,  in  any  absolute,  outside  and  apart  from  human 
knowledge.  He  did  not  even,  to  pass  to  a  very  different 
illustration,  set  up  the  Prussian  constitution  as  a  final 


MISREADINGS  OF  HEGEL  335 

deliverance  of  truth.  It  was  merely  one  among  a  number 
of  other  phenomena  which  had  to  be  investigated  as  among 
existing  facts,  in  their  relation  to  human  individuality. 
About  this  he  says,  in  the  preface  to  his  Rechtsphilosophie, 
that  the  book  is  no  more  than  an  attempt  to  conceive 
of  and  present  the  state  in  the  form  it  has  actually 
assumed  as  the  embodiment  of  rational  knowledge. 

"  Philosophy  has  to  be  on  its  guard  against  constructing 
a  state  as  it  ought  to  be.  Philosophy  cannot  teach  the 
state  what  it  should  be,  but  only  how  the  ethical  universe 
is  to  be  known." 

And  again,  in  the  Zusatz  to  paragraph  273  : 

"  The  principle  of  the  modern  world  as  a  whole  is 
freedom  of  subjectivity,  the  principle  that  essential  aspects 
of  the  spiritual  whole  should  attain  their  right  by  self- 
development.  From  this  standpoint  one  can  hardly 
raise  the  idle  question  as  to  which  form  is  the  better, 
monarchy  or  democracy." 

Why,  then,  has  he  been  so  much  misinterpreted  ?  One 
reason  is  that  in  the  hands  of  lesser  men  the  instrument 
which  he  wielded  easily  was  too  ponderous  for  them. 
After  his  death  his  school  split  up  into  subordinate  groups, 
which  by  degrees  perished  from  sheer  feebleness.  There 
was  an  orthodox  group  of  the  right,  which  found  a  mission 
in  the  defence  of  orthodoxy  in  religion  and  politics.  With 
these  topics  Hegel  had  professed  carefully  to  refrain  from 
concerning  himself,  on  the  ground  that  they  lay  outside 
the  limits  of  his  philosophy.  There  was  also  a  more 
vigorous  school  of  the  left,  containing  leaders  like  Strauss, 
Karl  Marx,  and  Lassalle,  which  again  went  far  beyond  the 
teaching  of  its  founder.  There  was  in  addition  a  variety 
of  smaller  groups  of  disciples,  rivulets  in  which  the  main 
current  was  frittered  away,  to  disappear  in  sandy  soil. 

Another  reason  was  the  personality  of  Hegel  himself. 
He  commanded  admiration  because  of  his  intellectual 
power,  but  the  love  of  the  general  public  he  never  com- 
manded, as  Kant  did,  or  as  Schiller  and  even  Goethe  did 
in  literature.  His  was  a  grim  figure,  and  by  no  means 
altogether  inspiring.  Goethe,  who  had  in  some  ways  a 


336  THE   HEGELIAN   PRINCIPLE 

high  respect  for  him,  and  in  whose  study  at  Weimar  a 
bust  of  Hegel  still  stood  in  the  days  when  I  last  visited  it, 
had  a  very  definite  sense  of  certain  defects  in  Hegel's 
character.1  The  curious  will  find  these  touched  on  in  the 
published  correspondence  between  Goethe  and  Zelter 
which  took  place  at  the  time  of  Hegel's  death. 

Still,  detached  as  in  many  respects  Hegel  was  about 
public  matters,  there  is  no  doubt  that  while  he  was  a 
Professor  at  Berlin  he  made  himself  at  times  more  useful 
than  was  becoming  to  the  Prussian  Government  of  the 
day.  His  attitude  was  not  always  admirable.  Indeed, 
his  personality  does  not  appear  to  have  been  in  all  respects 
an  attractive  one.  His  strength  lay  in  his  tremendous 
intellectual  power,  although  in  his  letters  there  are  many 
indications  of  a  gentler  side.  He  was  no  recluse.  He 
went  into  the  literary  society  of  Berlin  freely.  Whether 
in  all  respects  he  possessed  "  the  social  gift,"  or  was 
wholly  a  success  there,  is  not  clear.  At  least  he  appears 
to  have  liked  to  meet  his  fellow  human  beings.  He  is 
said  to  have  played  whist,  and  to  have  found  in  it  the 
relaxation  which  the  great  Moltke  was  to  find  in  it  later 
on.  He  was  a  good  husband  and  father.  He  is  reported 
to  have  himself  kept  his  household  accounts,  and  that 
rigorously.  In  these  respects  he  differed  from  those 
eminent  philosophers  who  have  found  metaphysics  to 
consist  best  with  a  solitary  life  unblessed  by  wife  and  family. 
Spinoza,  for  example,  and  also  Kant  sternly  preferred  the 
companionship  of  their  own  thoughts. 

One  cannot  call  his  a  figure  that  appeals  to  the  imagina- 
tion. His  power  of  influencing  men  lay  in  a  wholly 
different  direction.  Perhaps  his  lack  of  personal  popu- 
larity has  had  something  to  do  with  the  distorted  image 
of  his  system  that  the  man  in  the  street  seems  to  have 
constructed  and  to  have  passed  on  to  the  present  genera- 
tion. But  in  any  event  the  last  description  that  would 
suggest  itself  to  anyone  who  has  really  busied  himself  in 
trying  to  get  an  accurate  impression  of  this  extraordinarily 
powerful  figure  in  the  Walhalla  of  thought  is  that  he  was 
either  a  mystic  or  obscure  in  his  apprehension.  His 
knowledge  was  enormous,  both  of  the  literature  and  of 
the  science  available  in  his  time,  and  he  had  full  command 

1  Goethe  disliked  the  political  atmosphere  of  Berlin.  To  Hegel  it  waa 
by  no  means  uncongenial. 


HIS   PERSONALITY  337 

of  it.  For  the  rest,  he  appears  as  a  rather  hard  man, 
always  master  of  himself,  and  never  expressing  emotion 
unless  of  deliberate  purpose.  Few  great  thinkers  have 
steeled  themselves  more  against  deflection  by  side  interests. 
With  Hegel  the  system  is  the  outcome  of  an  unswerving 
industry  in  accumulating  material  and  of  adhesion  to  a 
single  line  of  thought. 

It  is  a  hundred  years  since  he  wrote  his  most  important 
books,  and  they  were  written  in  a  phraseology  which  is 
ill-suited  to  the  present  day.  No  doubt  philosophy  has 
suffered  much  from  looseness  in  expression  and  from  the 
introduction  of  metaphor  into  its  language.  But  Hegel 
went  further  than  was  required  towards  the  opposite 
extreme.  He  devised  a  terminology  which  is  his  own, 
but,  although  exact,  is  of  a  barbarous  kind.  He  is 
systematic  as  only  a  German  can  be  systematic.  At 
times  this  feature  approaches  to  pedantry.  But  if  the 
language  is  repellent  it  is  careful  and  replete  with  meaning. 
In  what  he  says  there  is  always  an  approach  to  scientific 
precision.  Once  master  his  principle  and  his  method 
of  expressing  it,  and  he  is  never  difficult  to  follow.  But 
then  the  preliminary  discipline  to  which  the  reader  has  to 
subject  himself  is  severe.  For  the  writing  is  for  the  most 
part  as  abstract  in  form  as  a  German  can  make  it,  and  to 
say  that  is  to  say  a  good  deal. 

However,  what  really  makes  Hegel  so  difficult  is  some- 
thing not  his  fault.  It  is  the  inherent  difficulty  of  the 
problem,  a  problem  that  is  probably  in  itself  more  baffling 
than  any  other  we  know  of.  After  all,  Plato  and  Aristotle 
and  Plotinus,  who  had  the  same  problem  to  deal  with, 
are  really  more  difficult  to  follow.  Their  terminology,  if 
less  abstract,  is  looser  and  more  obscure,  and  had  they 
written  in  German  their  methods  of  exposition  would 
probably  to-day  have  been  reprobated  even  more  than  is 
that  of  Hegel.  " 

I  have  already  indicated  how  Kant  stopped  at  a  point 
where  the  way  beyond  divided  itself,  and  how  Schopenhauer 
and  Bergson  have  followed  one  branch  of  the  divided  path. 
Hegel  pursued  the  other.  For  him  Kant's  "  thing-in- 
itself "  was,  as  with  them,  an  illusion,  but  the  way 
towards  ultimate  reality  lay,  not  in  direct  awareness  or 
intuition  of  anything  in  itself,  but  in  a  resolute  attempt 
to  discover  the  character  of  knowledge  freed  from  the 


388  THE   HEGELIAN   PRINCIPLE 

special  relativity  with  which  Kant  had  invested  it.  This 
was  the  source  of  Kant's  belief  in  something  inaccessible 
to  experience,  but  which  might  yet  be  the  basis  both  of 
our  thought  and  of  the  things  which  it  was  about. 
Hegel's  alternative  plan  was  to  observe  knowledge  pas- 
sively in  its  self-development  through  its  multitudinous 
forms.  Its  intrinsic  nature  was  for  him  to  be  active 
or  dynamic.  The  fashion  in  which  he  found  this  dynamic 
activity  displaying  itself  in  the  movement  of  thought  he 
named  the  Begriff.  The  dialectical  quality  of  concep- 
tions, by  which  each  implied  the  other  and  took  its 
place  within  an  intellectual  entirety,  yielded,  as  the 
result  of  observation  of  thought  and  things  alike,  a  self- 
completing  system,  called  the  "  Idea."  The  individual, 
or  universal  in  concrete  form,  was  the  actual,  and  the 
actual  was  always  individual.  No  merely  abstract 
thoughts,  no  system  of  universals,  taken  per  se  could  be 
actual.  Nor,  on  the  other  hand,  could  a  merely  objective 
world  exist  dissociated  from  intelligence,  as  if  self- 
subsistent  independently  of  it.  Such  a  world  would  be 
no  more  than  a  mere  counter-abstraction,  with  no  factual 
reality.  The  true  reality  was  to  be  found  in  the  concrete 
experience  disclosed  in  our  minds,  the  factual  reality  of 
which  could  not  be  questioned.  For  in  mind  the  universal 
and  the  particular,  the  abstraction  and  the  counter- 
abstraction,  were  actual  as  united  in  what  was  individual, 
and,  as  these  two  factors  or  moments,  were  constitutive  of 
what  was  concrete  and  as  such  actual.  To  determine  the 
character  of  ultimate  reality  the  only  way  was  therefore 
to  observe  the  disclosure  made  by  the  mind  of  its  own 
nature  and  its  own  dialectic.  If  we  did  this  faithfully 
we  should  be  able  to  see  in  what  its  human  and  finite 
quality  consisted,  and  in  what  respects  the  human  mind, 
as  appearing  in  nature  and  in  self-consciousness,  imported 
what  was  more  than  finite  as  its  foundation.  This  problem 
he  worked  out  in  his  first  great  book,  The  Phenomenology 
of  Mind.  The  result  was  for  him,  as  in  the  main  for 
Aristotle,  that  knowledge  was  disclosed  as  being  foun- 
dational  of  reality.  The  next  step  was,  by  logical  analysis, 
to  distinguish  within  knowledge  its  moments,  a  task  which 
could  only  be  accomplished  reflectively  and  by  abstraction 
from  the  concrete  reality.  He  set  himself  to  make  the 
requisite  analysis  in  his  Logic,  the  first  part  of  his  Encyclo- 


HIS   METHOD  330 

pcedia.  There  he  sought  to  work  out  the  various  forms 
of  abstract  conception  which  actual  knowledge  implies 
and  makes  explicit.  He  also  exhibited  what  he  took  to 
be  the  dialectical  or  dynamic  activity  by  which  each  form 
of  conception  involves  and  passes  into  a  negative  counter- 
part, a  further  abstraction  by  the  incorporation  of  which 
it  is  enriched,  with  the  result  that  a  third  conception  is 
always  precipitated,  in  its  turn  to  develop  its  own  nature 
similarly  in  virtue  of  this  active  character  of  reflection. 
The  entirety  is  a  system  of  abstract  thought,  as  naturally 
inherent  in  and  characteristic  of  the  objects  of  mind  as 
it  is  of  knowledge  regarded  from  a  subjective  standpoint. 
The  completed  entirety,  being  no  more  than  a  system 
of  universals  yielded  by  abstraction,  naturally  requires  a 
counter-system  with  the  character  of  particularity,  in 
order  to  the  attainment  of  real  existence  in  actual  know- 
ledge as  we  find  it  in  experience.  This  it  has  in  the 
counter-abstraction  which  we  call  nature,  which  is  just 
as  necessary  and  foundational  as  is  abstract  thought. 
Neither  creates  the  other,  and  both  are  real  only  in  their 
union  in  experience  and  in  mind,  which  carries  us  beyond 
what  is  usually  meant  by  experience.  For  it  is  experience 
that  constitutes  the  basic  reality  from  which  the  start  is 
made,  and  which  all  reflection  presupposes.  Thought  does 
not  make  things  any  more  than  things  make  thought. 
Idealism  and  realism,  as  hard  and  fast  principles,  are  alike 
beside  the  point. 

Hegel  goes  on,  after  displaying  Logic,  Nature,  and  Mind 
Actual,  in  the  three  volumes  of  his  Encyclopedia,  to  apply 
his  doctrine.  It  imports,  as  implied  by  its  character,  a 
system  of  scale  of  degrees,  both  in  knowledge  and  in 
objective  existence,  corresponding  to  the  standpoints  to 
which  the  self-evolving  character  of  reflection  gives  rise. 
The  application  by  him  of  this  principle  takes  the  form  of 
a  treatment  in  detail,  in  accordance  with  his  ground 
conception  of  reality,  of  various  branches  of  human  know- 
ledge, as  we  find  them,  for  example,  in  Ethics  and  the 
theory  of  the  State,  in  ^Esthetics,  in  Religion,  and  in 
History.  As  regards  the  last,  we  owe  to  him,  probably 
more  than  to  any  other,  the  modern  historical  method. 
His  task  he  accomplishes  in  a  series  of  volumes  with  an 
impressive  command  of  material.  He  was  a  tremendous 
student,  equipped  by  long  years  of  patient  research  in 


840  THE   HEGELIAN   PRINCIPLE 

almost  every  department,  and  thorough  in  his  work  to 
the  last  degree.  It  is  his  critical  outlook  in  these  regions, 
based  on  a  coherent  principle,  that  has  been  the  source 
of  much  of  his  influence  in  philosophy,  and  that  has 
continued  to  exercise  a  great  influence  even  in  our  own 
times.  For  there  are  few,  if  any,  out-and-out  Hegelians 
left.  The  attempt  he  made  to  exhibit  the  entire  universe 
in  systematic  form  has  been  adjudged  too  ambitious. 
Even  in  recent  British  philosophy,  such  as  that  of  Green, 
Bradley,  and  Bosanquet,  it  is  the  spirit  and  not  the  letter 
of  Hegelianism  that  is  apparent.  But  his  influence, 
indirect  as  well  as  direct,  has  been  enormous,  and  it  is  in 
both  this  country  and  America,  and  now  also  in  India, 
apparent  to-day  as  much  more  alive  than  it  has  been  in 
Germany  for  fifty  years  past. 

The  Germans  are  fond  of  saying  that  they  have  made 
more  out  of  Shakespeare  than  we  in  Britain  have.  This 
saying  may  or  may  not  have  some  colour  of  truth.  But 
it  is  probably  still  more  true  that  we  have  made  more 
out  of  Hegel  than  they  have. 

I  shall  not  try  to  describe  even  briefly  what  Hegel 
taught  the  world  in  Hegel's  language.  What  I  wish 
to  do  is  to  inquire  what  is  the  point  of  view  in  which  his 
teaching  has  culminated.  To  this  I  proceed.  For  not 
only  is  he  still  well  worth  study  even  to-day,  but  those 
who  have  not  studied  him  hard  and  wrestled  with  his 
text  are  scarcely  fully  equipped  for  the  investigation 
which  a  modern  philosophical  critic  has  to  undertake.  I 
often  observe  in  otherwise  able  writers  easy  conclusions 
about  him,  based  on  materials  supplied  by  middlemen. 
Yet  no  such  source  of  supply  will  do.  The  fountain-head 
must  be  sought.  Modern  Germany  has  in  the  main  forgotten 
him,  and  into  modern  Britain  and  America  and  India  his  real 
lesson,  like  the  lesson  taught  by  Aristotle  whom  he  brought 
back  to  life  for  us,  has  only  of  late  years  penetrated.  Even 
to-day  some  of  his  most  interesting  criticisms,  such  as  those 
in  the  Zusdtze  of  the  Philosophy  of  Mind,  which  were  omitted 
by  the  late  Professor  Wallace  in  his  admirable  translation 
of  the  book,  are  accessible  only  in  the  original  text. 

As  I  interpret  him,  he  broke  definitely  and  finally  with 
Kant's  attempt  to  treat  knowledge  as  an  instrument 
which  we  can  hold  out  and  look  at  as  something  capable 
of  being  critically  dissected  ab  extra  into  constituent  parts. 


HEGEL'S   VIEW   OF   KNOWLEDGE  341 

For  Hegel  knowledge  in  its  comprehensive  meaning  was 
the  foundation  and  source  of  all  that  was,  is,  and  can 
be,  the  medium  of  all  possible  existence,  culminating  at 
its   highest   degree   in   the   exhibition   of  the   distinction 
between  the  self  and  its  object  as  superseded.     It  is  for 
him  within  and  through  knowledge  that  this  and  every 
other    distinction    is    made,    whether    between   real    and 
unreal,  or  fact  and  fancy,  or  being  and  knowing.     For 
him  the  Absolute  was  knowledge  taken  in  the  wide  sense 
in  which  it  presents  the  aspects  both  of  experience  and  of 
what   is   experienced,    according   as   we   approach   it    in 
reflection.     Reality  is  an  experience  that  embraces  what 
is  felt  and  willed  not  less  than  what  is  thought.     Know- 
ledge is  our  fundamental  fact,  the  "  That  "  from  which 
we  start  and  outside  which  we  cannot  get.     Mere  feeling 
and  mere  thought  are  only  asymptotic  limits  which  we 
set  before  ourselves  in  our  attempts  to  unravel  our  experi- 
ence.    If  we  marshal  its  riches  adequately  it  will  unravel 
itself  before  us.     For  its  form  is  to  be  not  only  individual 
but    dynamic.     Universal    and    particular    unite    in    the 
individual  reality  as  its  moments.     This  is  so  because  the 
form  contains  thought  as  much  as  feeling,  and  is  con- 
tinuously self-developing  and  not  static,  the  activity  of 
subject  and  not  of  substance.     The  individual  is  always 
breaking  out  beyond  itself  into  the  infinity  of  its  relations. 
There   are  thoughts   and  therefore   universals   which  we 
fix  for  the  moment  in  judgments  of  understanding.     We 
believe  that  we  can  put  them  into  nutshells,  and  we  try. 
But,  in  language  which  the  late  Lord  Macnaghten  used 
about  the   "  Rule  in  Shelley's  Case,"  it  is   one  thing  to 
put    these   ideas   into    a    nutshell   and   quite   another  to 
keep  them  there.     The  ideal  of  truth  is  the  whole,   and 
knowledge  is  always  reaching  beyond  itself  after  a  larger 
entirety  which  abstract  thinking  is  constantly  forced  to 
seek  as  qualifying  the  apparently  static  "  That."     For  from 
the  "  That  "    the  "  What  "  is  never  severable,  nor  does  it 
itself  ever  stand  still.     In  the  phases  of  experience  of  which 
Hegel   speaks   the   universal   is   nothing   apart   from   the 
particular,  and  the  particular  as  such,  taken  by  itself,  is 
equally  unreal.     Both,  as  I  have  said  earlier,  are  abstrac- 
tions.    The  only  actual  is  the  individual  fact  from  which 
they  are  abstractions  non-existent  in  independence.     The 
essence  of  such  an  actual  is  that  identity  in  difference  which 


342  THE   HEGELIAN   PRINCIPLE 

is  intelligible  only  when  mind  has  an  object  in  which  its 
own  character  is  expressed.  So  alone  can  the  whole  be 
latent  in  its  completeness  in  every  detail.  Because  its 
essence  is  to  embody  such  a  whole  the  individual  is  always 
breaking  out,  in  the  intellectual  setting  outside  which  it 
has  no  significance  whatever,  in  the  activity  from  which 
it  is  inseparable,  into  relations,  into  predicates,  into 
universals,  which  have  yet  no  substance  apart  from  the 
facts  they  qualify,  facts  which  appear  as  particular  only 
for  the  abstraction  through  which  our  apprehension  strips 
and  isolates  its  work.  Thought  is  relational,  but  for 
Hegel  it  is  more  than  relational.  It  is  always  transcending 
this  phase  by  seeking  for  further  wholes  in  which  the  re- 
lations it  establishes  are  included  and  superseded.  Such  is 
the  movement  of  experience.  It  is  our  experience,  yet  we, 
found  in  it  as  finite,  are  only  so  found  by  distinctions  which 
thought  makes  within  the  field  of  its  own  reality.  As  in 
its  activity  the  moment  of  the  subject  comes  into 
prominence,  we  are  carried  by  reflection  beyond  the  idea 
of  self  as  only  a  sentient  and  intelligent  organism  existing 
within  a  world  which  controls  as  well  as  confronts  it. 
It  is  so  that  we  have  experience  at  its  degrees  in  the 
order  of  reality,  and  it  is  only  through  reflection  that  we 
become  aware  that  such  experience  points  beyond  itself 
to  the  conception  of  an  entirety  in  which  subject  and  the 
object  in  knowledge  cease  to  appear  divergent,  a  self- 
contained  system  outside  which  there  is  nothing,  inasmuch 
as  there  is  and  can  be  no  meaning  to  be  attached  to 
existence  outside  or  beyond  it.  Such  an  idea  we  who  exist 
in  point  of  fact  as  finite  centres,  conditioned  by  our  station 
in  the  world,  cannot  visualise.  It  cannot  be  yielded  by 
the  particulars  of  sensation.  It  is  intelligible  only 
mediately  and  for  reflection,  not  by  direct  apprehension. 
Nevertheless  it  is  the  truth  about  the  object- world,  and 
is  that  in  reference  to  which  such  a  world  alone  has  a 
meaning.  This  is  the  Hegelian  Begriff  or  "  Notion,"  and 
its  completion,  when  its  full  implication  in  the  entire 
system  of  its  activity  is  before  us,  is  the  Hegelian  system. 

Now,  how  does  Hegel  get  at  this  result  ?  What  is  his 
method  ?  To  understand  this  we  have  again  to  turn  to 
his  first  great  work,  the  account  of  his  "  voyage  of  dis- 
covery," published  in  1807,  under  the  title  of  the 
Phenomenology  of  Mind.  The  book  was  finished,  in  the 


HIS   PHENOMENOLOGY   OF   MIND  343 

autumn  of  1806,  amid  the  rattling  of  sabres.  Napoleon 
entered  the  little  university  town  of  Jena  while  Hegel 
was  putting  his  last  touches  to  his  work.  "  I  have  seen 
the  World  Spirit,"  writes  Hegel  characteristically  to  a 
friend  :  "it  was  on  horseback." 

It  is  the  world  spirit,  in  a  wider  meaning  than  the 
domination  of  Europe  by  any  one  man,  that  Hegel  set 
himself  to  consider  in  his  Phenomenology ;  it  is  the  pene- 
tration of  experience  by  thought.  He  starts  from  what 
seems  simplest  and  least  mediated  by  reflection,  and 
assumes  the  role  of  a  passive  observer  who  watches  the 
work  of  reflection,  playing  not  only  on  what  is  externally 
apprehended,  but  on  what  is  of  its  own  nature.  I  notice 
that  it  is  now  noon,  and  I  write  it  down.  But  no  sooner 
have  I  done  so  than  this  immediate  truth  has  ceased  to  be 
immediate.  It  belongs  to  the  past.  It  was  then  noon. 
Now  it  is  a  quarter  past  noon.  "  Now,"  which  appeared  to 
be  given  to  me  as  an  inert  and  particular  character  in  per- 
ception, turns  out,  as  soon  as  I  try  to  fix  it,  to  have  been 
fashioned  through  an  active  if  abstract  universal,  real 
only  in  a  succession  of  singular  or  individual  occurrences. 
It  is  the  same  throughout  with  the  "  Here  "  and  the 
"  Now  "  ;  the  "  This  "  and  the  "  That  "  ;  the  "  I  "  and 
the  "  You."  It  is  as  universals  that  they  have  meaning 
and  remain  enduring  in  a  succession  of  singulars,  the 
nature  of  which  is  always  to  be  developing  new  relations 
for  itself.  This  is  why  scientific  truth  is  always  abstract. 
The  self-developing  character  of  the  immediately  real 
never  stands  still,  for  what  is  immediate  derives  its 
stability  and  permanent  significance  from  the  thought  in 
which  it  sets  itself.  Goethe  knew  this  when  he  wrote 
the  lines  in  which,  in  the  Prologue  to  Faust,  he  makes  it 
a  command  from  God  to  man  to  strive  to  hold  fast  the 
best  in  life  by  setting  it  in  thought  that  endures. 

The  penetration  of  mind  into  reality  is  everywhere 
apparent.  Mind  is  not  a  thing  merely  confronted  by 
another  thing,  its  environment.  It  is  an  activity,  a  power 
that  at  every  point  makes  that  environment  what  it  is  for 
us  and  what  it  is  in  itself.  It  contains  within  itself  the 
environment,  as  well  as  the  centre  for  the  reflection  in 
which  its  objects  are  focussed  ;  finds  itself  as  what  makes 
these  objects  real ;  and  establishes  the  distinction  between 
itself  and  them.  As  I  look  out  on  the  country  that  lies 


344  THE   HEGELIAN   PRINCIPLE 

in  front  of  the  window  at  which  I  am  at  this  particular 
moment  writing,  I  see  that  great  truth  everywhere 
exemplified.  Relativity  is  the  order  of  the  day.  If 
there  is  matter  which  seems  inert  it  is  only  because  for 
practical  purposes  I  regard  it  as  such.  The  corn  grows 
up  as  if  purposively  realising  an  end,  by  transforming  the 
soil  and  moisture  about  it  and  making  them  parts  of  a 
living  vegetation.  Life  is  everywhere,  and  the  more  I 
look  closely  at  what  seems  to  be  its  environment,  the 
more  I  find  that  environment  to  have  its  meaning  only 
in  relation  to  life.  If  I  regard  it  otherwise,  as  the  mathe- 
matician, the  physicist,  and  the  chemist  must  do,  it  is 
in  order  to  isolate  and  fix  aspects  gotten  by  abstractions 
which  do  not  exhaust  its  reality  ;  in  other  words,  to  get 
knowledge  belonging  to  different  orders  in  reflection,  and 
affording  degrees  in  that  reality.  The  stages  in  the 
panorama  which  unrolls  itself  in  front  of  me,  the  self- 
presentation  of  the  hills,  of  the  river,  of  the  trees,  and 
of  the  men  and  women  who  are  working  in  the  fields,  none 
of  these  disclose  a  single  or  exclusive  degree  of  reality. 
All  are  present  as  aspects  that  are  not  separate  existences, 
but  are  the  outcome  of  different  standpoints  that  imply 
each  other  in  the  entirety  which  underlies  my  experience 
of  each  taken  as  singular.  The  rocks  are  worn  down  by 
the  water,  and  are  required  to  furnish  the  material  which 
life  incorporates  and  exhibits  at  a  new  stage  for  reflection. 
The  basic  slag,  which  is  the  refuse  from  the  ironworks, 
serves  the  life  that  incorporates  it  into  organic  existence 
as  a  valuable  manure.  The  farmer  and  the  farm  servants 
respect  each  other  as  personalities,  brought  into  unison 
in  their  labours  by  the  common  purposes  of  the  conscious 
intelligence  which  assigns  to  them  their  places  in  a 
kingdom  of  ends.  Everywhere  nature  shows  aspects 
which  are  degrees  in  relationship  only  in  a  known  that 
has  no  significance  separable  from  its  being  known.  As 
Aristotle  long  ago  pointed  out,  the  antithesis  between 
matter  and  form  is  a  fluent  one.  What  is  in  one  reference 
matter  is  in  another  reference  form.  Wood,  he  told  us,  in 
relation  to  the  finished  house  is  matter ;  in  relation  to  the 
growing  tree  in  which  it  is  alive,  it  is  form.  So  the  soul 
in  relation  to  the  body  is  form,  in  relation  to  reason  it  is 
matter.  The  Aristotelian  conception  was  that  the 
totality  of  existence  constituted  a  graduated  scale,  of 


ARISTOTLE   AND    HEGEL 

which  the  lowest  degree  was  a  "  first  matter  "  entirely 
without  form,  and  the  highest  a  "  last  form  "  entirely 
without  matter.  What  finds  itself  between  these  limits 
is  in  one  aspect  matter,  in  another  form,  and  each 
is  constantly  translating  itself  into  the  other  in  a 
process  of  what  for  the  great  thinker  was  a  process 
of  becoming,  through  higher  and  ideal  formations  in 
reflection. 

The  Hegelian  conception  of  experience  in  the  Phenomeno- 
logy is  not  different  in  principle.  For  Hegel,  too,  relations 
which  are  only  intelligible  as  being  akin  to  those  of  thought 
are  constantly  breaking  through  the  abstractness  of  a 
supposed  mutual  externality,  and  disclose  the  real  as  a 
series  of  stages  in  quality.  The  series  does  not  appear 
as  one  of  mere  succession  in  time,  for  time  from  the 
psychological  point  of  view  is  itself  but  a  form  of  abstract 
externality.  Still,  apart  from  series  in  some  shape,  and 
from  notions  which  it  implies,  the  riches  of  the  world  as 
it  appears  are  inexplicable  and  unmeaning.  Substance 
and  cause  are  notions  that  pass  over  into  each  other  in 
reflection.  The  effect  is  in  one  view  identical  with  the 
sum  of  the  conditions  that  constitute  its  ground.  In 
another  view  the  distinction  between  the  cause  and  what 
follows  on  it  is  vital  and  cannot  be  ignored,  inasmuch  as 
adequacy  of  thought  requires  it.  Thought,  conceived  as 
giving  rise  in  its  activity  to  the  standpoints  from  which  it 
treats  reality  in  the  experience  that  is  its  object,  is  for 
Hegel  the  ground  fact  of  the  Universe,  and  it  is  the  play 
of  thought  in  its  self-development  that  is  the  spectacle 
he  seeks  to  unfold  in  the  Phenomenology,  alike  in  the 
world  and  in  the  self. 

The  ground  forms  of  such  foundational  thinking,  taken 
in  their  relation  to  each  other  as  a  self-completing  series 
of  abstract  categories  which  culminate  in  an  entirety,  is, 
as  I  have  observed  earlier,  the  subject  of  Hegel's  Logic. 
It  is  thus  a  metaphysic  which  deals  only  with  conceptions 
got  by  abstraction  from  the  actual.  The  advantage  of  so 
treating  them  is  that  their  significance  can  be  ascertained, 
and  a  dialectical  movement  of  thought  can  be  exhibited 
in  which  the  relational  form,  into  which  the  sharp  dis- 
tinctions made  by  understanding  throw  our  judgments, 
is  superseded  by  being  made  subservient  to  the  end  that 
takes  shape  in  the  entirety  of  the  process.  This  entirety 


346  THE  HEGELIAN   PRINCIPLE 

is  the  "  Idea,"  and  his  Logic  exhibits  it  in  a  form  in  which 
it  and  its  contents  are  not  more  than  mere  abstractions. 
The  counter-abstraction  to  its  character  as  a  kingdom  of 
universals  is  described  in  his  Philosophy  of  Nature,  where 
externality  in  space  and  time,  the  primary  characteristic 
of  particularity,  appears  as  reality  under  another  aspect, 
which  cannot  stand  by  itself,  or  even  be  stated  in  the 
form  of  mere  particulars.  The  abstractions  of  the  Logic 
and  the  counter-abstractions  of  the  Philosophy  of  Nature, 
have  meaning  and  reality  only  as  the  universal  and 
particular  moments  which  are  implied  in  our  experience 
and  in  the  individual  form  which  distinguishes  it.  Neither 
set  is  created  by  or  can  be  deduced  from  the  other.  Such 
abstractions  have  existence  merely  from  a  metaphysical 
outlook,  and  attain  to  factual  reality  only  in  the  mind 
in  which  they  combine.  But  because  it  implies,  not 
merely  pure  thought,  but  the  natural  aspect  also,  mind, 
which  is  thus  inseparable  from  the  particular,  from  one 
point  of  view  arises  through  nature.  It  is,  therefore,  at 
its  lower  degrees  of  actuality,  finite.  But  it  is  also  pre- 
supposed by  nature  which  attains  reality  only  in  it.  Mind 
can  thus  exhibit  an  ascending  order  of  degrees,  and  accord- 
ingly it  presents  aspects,  depending  on  these  in  their  order 
and  character,  as  belonging  to  self-consciousness,  not 
only  in  the  individual,  but  in  the  family,  the  state,  and  the 
embodiments  of  intelligence  in  ethical  and  juridical  systems. 
The  Prussian  constitution,  as  I  have  said,  was,  for  Hegel,  a 
fact  of  experience  to  be  investigated  in  its  place  just  like  any 
other.  Its  position  in  the  panorama  of  the  world's  history 
and  the  logical  significance  of  its  structure  had  to  be  ex- 
amined. But  beyond  this  Prussian  state  and  beyond  every 
other  were  the  ideals  and  degrees  in  reality  realised  in 
spiritual  life,  in  Art,  in  Religion,  and  in  the  knowledge  that 
has  so  emancipated  itself  from  limited  ends  and  consequent 
undue  abstractions  that  it  can  take  account  of  the  object- 
world  as  in  ultimate  analysis  that  in  which  mind  finds 
itself  and  nothing  outside  or  beyond  itself. 

It  is  just  mind,  taken  at  the  highest  stage  it  reaches 
through  Art,  through  Religion,  through  Philosophy,  that 
finds  God  as  immanent  in  it,  and  experience  rightly 
interpreted  to  be  the  real  revealing  itself.  A  direct  and 
immediate  apprehension  of  the  full  truth  is  not  possible 
for  an  intelligence  that  is  throughout  hampered  by  the 


THE   CONTINGENT  347 

moment  of  the  particular,  and  is  bound  up  with  bodily 
organs  and  with  nature  itself.  We  are  in  the  world  though 
not  of  it,  and  we  cannot  escape  from  the  external  and 
the  contingent.  The  particularity  of  the  very  self  opens 
the  door  for  error  and  for  sin.  For,  as  we  have  seen,  if 
nature  has  its  foundation  in  mind,  mind  has  its  finite 
aspects  through  nature.  That  is  how  the  irrational  and 
contingent  arises  and  confuses  mankind,  and  that  is  why 
the  reflective  consciousness  has  a  long  path  to  travel 
towards  its  emancipation  from  the  deadening  mass  of  what 
confronts  it.  But  as  we  comprehend  we  transcend,  and 
thought,  even  when  conditioned  by  an  inseparable  sense 
of  finiteness,  is  in  its  nature  infinite.  By  the  use  of 
concepts  which,  though  always  abstract  may  be  not  the 
less  true,  by  the  power  of  reason,  it  can  thus  reach 
conclusions  about  God  as  well  as  about  man.  For  the 
difficulties  and  the  mysteries  have  their  fountain  and 
origin  in  a  limitation  which  it  is  aware  of  and,  just  for 
that  reason,  is  ever  passing  beyond. 

Such,  as  I  understand  it,  is  the  underlying  principle  of 
the  Hegelian  view  of  the  relation  of  the  cosmos  to  the 
completed  entirety  of  knowledge,  the  Idea  realising  itself 
in  mind  with  the  combination  of  general  and  particular 
moments  in  its  activity.  The  factors  in  that  activity  are 
the  abstractions  of  universal  and  particular.  The  actual 
is  always  concrete  and  is  self -developing  experience.  It 
is  a  view  not  far  divergent  from  that  of  Aristotle,  whose 
teaching  had  influenced  it  profoundly.  It  may  be  too 
ambitious.  It  may  be  impossible  for  thought,  con- 
ditioned by  nature  as  it  is,  to  penetrate  as  far  as  Hegel 
attempted  to  penetrate  in  his  system.  But  at  least  the 
attempt  stands  out  like  that  of  the  great  Greek,  whom 
Dante  calls  "  the  Master  of  those  who  know,"  as  belonging 
to  the  highest  level  in  the  history  of  human  effort  in 
knowledge.  We  may  hesitate  before  accepting  the 
Hegelian  conclusions,  as  we  hesitate  to-day  to  accept  what 
was  told  us  by  Aristotle.  But  in  each  case  the  method 
employed  is  of  a  great  order,  and  it  is  the  method  that  is 
of  most  importance.  The  reader  lays  down  both  exposi- 
tions stimulated  in  his  faith  in  the  value  of  a  sustained 
effort  to  see  things  steadily  and  to  see  them  whole  from 
an  outlook  that  admits  no  limitation  to  the  "  wonderful 
might  of  thought."  If  thought  can  penetrate  at  all  into 


318  THE   HEGELIAN   PRINCIPLE 

the  millstone  that  is  inevitably  there  for  finite  minds 
that  are  organically  conditioned,  Aristotle  and  Hegel 
have  got  some  way  in  enabling  us  at  least  to  see  into  the 
general  nature  of  the  millstone. 

I  have  now  tried  to  say  what  can  be  said  about  the 
Hegelian  principle  in  the  compass  of  a  few  pages.  I  have 
confined  myself  purposely  to  its  bearing  on  the  doctrine 
of  relativity  in  knowledge,  a  bearing  which  appears  very 
close.  I  conclude  this  chapter  by  repeating  that  no 
philosophical  doctrine  has  been  more  misrepresented  or 
given  to  the  world  in  a  more  distorted  form  than  has  been 
Hegelianism  in  current  literature.  It  is  only  now  that 
we  are  beginning  to  understand  what  Hegel  really  meant 
to  do.  This  has  been  partly  due  to  the  abstract  and 
almost  pedantic  way  in  which  he  has  expounded  his  own 
thoughts.  But  the  thoughts  are  all  set  out  in  his  writings. 
It  is  his  apparently  too  ambitious  manner  of  exposition, 
and  also  the  rubbish  with  which  many  of  his  disciples 
and  commentators  proceeded  to  overlay  his  system,  which 
have  disguised  from  us  his  real  meaning.  But  the  lesson 
he  taught  has  already  been  assimilated  by  many.  It 
took  over  two  thousand  years  for  us  moderns  to  think 
ourselves  back  into  the  real  significance  of  the  teaching 
of  Plato  and  Aristotle.  It  seems,  however,  as  if  less  time 
would  be  really  required  to  penetrate  through  the  crust 
with  which  the  Hegelian  principle  has  got  overlaid. 


PART   IV 
THE    INDIVIDUAL    AND    HIS    ENVIRONMENT 


24  349 


CHAPTER    XVI 

THE   RELATION   OF   MAN   TO   SOCIETY 

UP  to  this  stage  what  we  have  been  concerned  with  has 
been  primarily  the  theoretical  aspect  of  knowledge.  But 
knowledge  is  more  than  merely  theoretical.  It  not  only 
issues  in  action,  but  it  is  action.  It  does  not  leave  its 
world  as  it  finds  it.  As  the  principle  of  relativity  shows, 
it  shapes  appearance  and  reality  alike  in  nature.  It  is 
the  fact  that  both  of  these  stand  to  it  in  a  relationship 
which  j  is  in  a  measure  dependent  even  on  the  organic  life  in 
which  knowledge  expresses  itself.  Colours,  for  example, 
may  vary  in  the  perceptions  of  different  individuals. 
Knowledge  is,  however,  not  the  less  spontaneous  and 
self-determining,  and  so  are  the  external  forms  which  it 
assumes  in  natural  and  social  life. 

Just  as  we  are  free  in  what  we  call  theoretical  knowledge, 
so  are  we  free  in  the  kind  of  knowledge  which  assumes 
the  form  of  choice.  We  can  select  on  our  own  initiative. 
And  just  as  what  we  know  theoretically  is  independent  of 
the  individual  subject,  in  so  far  as  both  arise  within 
knowledge  and  have  it,  in  its  foundational  character,  as 
their  common  basis,  so  it  is  with  value  and  the  choice 
of  value.  Values  are  in  their  essence  independent  of  the 
individual  subject  who  selects  them,  inasmuch  as  if  they 
did  not  owe  their  significance  and  reality  to  something 
else  than  his  arbitrary  selection  there  would  be  no  objec- 
tive world  of  the  good  and  the  beautiful,  any  more  than 
there  would  be  of  the  true.  When  we  know  what  we  know 
is  an  actual  and  real  world  that  is  independent  of  our 
subjectivity,  in  so  far  as  that  subjectivity  is  but  a 
derivative  result,  the  distinction  between  which  and  its 
object-world  is  a  distinction  which  falls  within  the  foun- 
dational character  of  mind  itself,  as  resulting  from  it. 
If  we  approve  of  some  end  or  of  some  possible  action  as 

301 


352        THE  RELATION   OF  MAN  TO  SOCIETY 

right  or  as  beautiful,  we  recognise  it  as  not  dependent  for 
being  so  on  an  arbitrary  choice.  It  is  so  and  cannot, 
the  conditions  remaining  unchanged,  be  otherwise. 
Here,  as  in  the  other  cases,  we  find  degrees  and  differences 
of  level  in  knowledge  and  reality. 

The  fact  is  only  another  illustration  of  the  principle 
that  the  individual  is  always  more  than  at  first  sight  he 
seems  to  be.  Whether  it  is  the  individual  as  the  active 
subject  in  knowledge,  or  the  individual  object  of  that 
knowledge,  what  becomes  apparent  is  that  we  are  dealing 
with  neither  a  fleeting  particular  nor  a  merely  static 
universal.  It  is  the  universal  that  is  active  in  individual 
form,  and  is  therefore  always  dynamic  as  pointing  beyond 
itself.  The  universal  moment  gives  the  identity  which 
is  not  the  less  identity  that  is  real  only  in  difference  and 
constant  change.  The  static  aspect  of  the  actual  is  due 
to  the  abstraction  which  hypostatises  the  universal  moment 
into  what  is  unreal,  save  for  the  legitimate  purpose  for 
which  abstraction  is  applied  in  clarifying  and  communi- 
cating knowledge. 

Value  in  its  ethical  and  aesthetic  sense  is  thus  the 
outcome  of  the  root  principle  of  degrees.  We  cannot 
challenge  the  ultimate  standards  of  such  value  or  express 
them  in  terms  of  what  is  lower.  Just  as  the  organism  is 
no  mere  aggregate  of  isolated  particles,  so  the  good  and 
the  beautiful  are  no  mere  preponderances  of  atomic 
pleasures.  Hedonism  has  always  failed  as  an  adequate 
expression  of  the  facts.  It  is  only  in  the  terms  that  are 
peculiar  to  themselves  that  we  can  even  speak  properly 
of  the  good  and  the  beautiful.  They  are  what  they  are 
because  they  stand  for  independent  stages  in  mind.  If 
the  phenomenal  world  in  which  they  are  illustrated  and 
expressed  is  but  transitory,  they  themselves,  as  principles, 
on  which  even  its  changing  aspects  depend  for  their 
reality  in  time,  are  not  transitory.  For  they  are  the 
conditions  apart  from  which  what  appears  in  time  cannot 
so  appear. 

We  have  seen  how  mechanism,  life,  and  personality 
present  themselves  as  belonging  to  different  levels  in  the 
real  world,  levels  of  which  the  explanation  cannot  be 
found  by  trying  to  construct  what  is  higher  out  of  what 
is  lower,  but  must  be  looked  for  rather  in  abstractions 
made  from  above  downwards  from  a  yet  fuller  reality. 


VALUES  353 

To  the  region  of  personality  belong  the  phenomena  of 
the  degrees  of  goodness  and  beauty.  It  is  the  will  that 
is  good.  It  is  for  the  mind,  and  for  the  mind  only, 
that  beauty  is  born  and  is  there.  Goodness  and  beauty 
are  what  have  been  called  tertiary  qualities,  but  they  are 
as  much  aspects  of  actual  fact  as  mechanism  or  life.  The 
emphasis  is  here  on  what  is  personal,  the  relation  of  the 
free  subject  to  the  object- world  of  which  in  certain  aspects 
it  forms  part.  But  neither  that  world  nor  the  mind 
which  it  confronts  is  capable  of  being  adequately 
described  apart  from  the  recognition  of  these  aspects  as 
integral  to  the  entirety. 

If  we  begin  with  the  good,  the  first  thing  that  strikes 
us  is  that  the  region  in  which  we  have  to  seek  it  is  that 
of  the  free  person.  He  can  choose,  and  in  certain  phases 
of  his  choice  it  is  an  individual  and  inward  standard 
which  appeals  to  him,  a  standard  set  up  by  his  con- 
science. He  knows  the  difference  between  right  and 
wrong,  and  his  inmost  self  bids  him  choose  what  is  right. 
He  stands  before  a  tribunal,  and  the  tribunal  is  his  own 
self,  his  self  at  a  higher  level  than  that  at  which  it  pursues 
the  merely  pleasant.  Just  as  in  man  knowledge  is  the 
medium  within  which  the  individual  self  develops  and 
expresses  itself,  so  it  is  with  the  individual  will.  The 
form  here  is  that  of  choice,  active  preference,  a  process, 
not  a  mere  isolated  event  in  time.  And  the  reality  of 
this  activity  cannot  be  understood  apart  from  a  higher 
degree  in  that  reality  than  the  isolated  and  fragmentary 
volition  of  the  individual,  looked  at  in  his  aspect  of  one 
organism  among  a  numerical  multitude.  In  all  of  these, 
just  as  there  is  identity  in  their  thinking,  so  there  is 
identity  in  their  ends  in  volition. 

In  the  next  chapter  we  shall  have  to  examine  the  possi- 
bility of  what  is  called  a  general  will,  and  to  see  what 
are  the  limits  of  the  conception  and  what  it  actually 
means.  At  present  it  is  sufficient  to  suggest  that  it  may 
prove  to  be  the  individual  mind  in  its  larger  significance, 
as  dominated  by  ends  that  in  other  individuals  are  identical 
with  its  own.  This  may  afford  explanation,  not  only  of 
morality  strictly  so  called,  but  of  much  besides  to  which 
we  shall  come  presently. 

What  we  call  conscience  is  this  sense  of  ends  of  higher 
value  and  obligation  than  any  that  are  concerned  with 


854         THE   RELATION   OF  MAN   TO   SOCIETY 

merely  personal  interests.  Conscience  is  what,  when  his 
sense  of  it  is  fully  awakened,  man  recognises  as  his  private 
tribunal,  his  own  court  for  decision  between  values.  But 
it  is  private  only  in  so  far  as  its  scope  is  the  life  of  the 
particular  man,  not  the  less  that  he  is  more  than  a  mere 
isolated  individual.  The  sanction  is  subjective,  and  it  is 
binding  on  himself  as  an  individual  subject.  He  has  in 
this  region  no  right  to  force  his  decision  as  regards  himself 
in  the  same  fashion  on  his  neighbours,  however  certain 
he  may  feel  about  that  decision  in  his  own  case.  The  very 
loftiness  of  the  motive  which  makes  a  man  think  more  of 
the  interests  of  his  neighbour  than  of  himself,  or  that  bids 
him  sell  his  goods  and  give  the  price  to  the  poor  in 
obedience  to  an  inward  call,  renders  that  motive  in  the 
highest  cases  incapable  of  being  made  a  rule  of  universal 
application  in  any  positive  form.  To  make  it  so  would 
be  to  trench  on  the  freedom  of  other  persons  to  seek  and 
follow  the  dictates  of  their  own  consciences.  That  was 
why  Kant's  attempt  failed,  the  attempt  to  lay  down  as  the 
canon  for  all  conduct  that  it  should  conform  to  an  obliga- 
tion to  act  at  all  times  from  maxims  fit  to  be  universal  rules. 
When  this  was  worked  out  in  relation  to  human  society  it 
appeared  that  such  maxims  could  be  no  more  than  merely 
negative,  and  must  prove  inadequate  as  guides  to  daily  life. 
Morality,  properly  so  called,  is  not  enough  for  citizen- 
ship. Society  requires  binding  rules  of  a  positive  char- 
acter, and  institutions  by  means  of  which  these  can  be 
made  effective.  Such  rules  must  restrain  effectively 
arbitrariness  in  individual  conduct,  in  the  interests  of  the 
community.  Without  them  others  could  not  have  freedom 
to  live  their  lives.  But  such  rules  are,  as  we  shall  see 
later  on,  simply  the  embodiment  or  expression  in  objective 
form  of  the  common  purposes  of  mankind  living  in  the 
groups  in  which  it  is  distributed.  Law,  properly  so  called, 
whether  civil  or  criminal,  consists  of  certain  regulations 
for  conduct  which  have  been  laid  down  publicly,  either 
directly  or  in  virtue  of  delegated  authority,  by  the  sovereign 
power  of  the  state.  There  has  been  such  a  delegation  even 
when  a  railway  company,  acting  with  statutory  authority 
conferred  on  it,  makes  bye-laws,  for  these  derive  their 
binding  character  in  reality  from  the  government  of  the 
state,  and  while  unrevoked  are  laws  as  binding  as  Acts 
of  Parliament. 


LAW  355 

But  law  is  more  than  a  mere  command.  It  is  this 
indeed,  but  it  has  a  significance  which  cannot  be  under- 
stood apart  from  the  history  and  spirit  of  the  nation 
whose  law  it  is.  Larger  conceptions  than  those  of  the 
mere  lawyer  are  required  for  the  appreciation  of  that 
significance,  conceptions  which  belong  to  the  past,  and 
which  fall  within  the  province  of  the  moralist  and  the 
sociologist.  Without  these  we  are  sometimes  unable  to 
determine  what  is  and  what  is  not  part  of  the  law. 
Anyone  familiar  with  the  proceedings  of  law  courts  knows 
how  often  the  historical  method  has  to  be  applied,  in  ascer- 
taining, for  example,  the  principles  which  decide  the 
invalidity  of  contracts  as  offending  against  public  policy. 
In  England  considerations  may  have  to  be  taken  into 
account  differing  from  those  which  would  obtain  in  a  like 
case  on  the  Continent.  The  laws  contain  general  rules  of 
conduct,  expressed  in  objective  form,  and  enforced  by 
sanctions  applied  by  the  state.  But  they  are  not  always 
to  be  found  expressed  in  definite  and  unchanging  form, 
and  the  tribunal  which  enforces  them  often  has  to  consider 
a  context  of  a  far-reaching  character,  a  context  which  may 
have  varied  from  generation  to  generation,  and  which 
may  render  even  a  written  rule  obsolete,  or  make  it 
necessary  to  apply  one  that  is  unwritten  and  about  which 
ethical  judgments  are  at  variance.  There  is  also  a  large 
class  of  cases  which  come  within  the  law,  but  which  the 
judges  feel  themselves  unable  to  decide.  When  the 
question  is  whether  a  van  has  been  driven  negligently,  or 
whether  a  contract  for  carriage  has  been  made  with  suffi- 
ciently clear  notice  given  that  the  contractor  has  only 
undertaken  to  convey  on  certain  terms,  the  terms,  for 
instance,  that  he  is  to  be  exempt  from  the  liability  that 
would  be  implied  had  be  been  silent,  the  question  whether 
in  such  cases  the  course  that  has  actually  been  followed 
was  proper  and  sufficient  may  turn  on  no  general  principle 
of  law  strictly  so  called.  It  may  depend,  not  on  abstract 
rules  which  cannot  take  account  of  all  the  particular 
considerations  that  ought  to  be  weighed,  but  on  what 
reasonable  men  of  the  world  would  say  that  their  fellow- 
man  ought  in  the  individual  situation  to  have  done.  In 
other  words,  the  judges  confine  themselves  to  defining  the 
question  and  to  saying  what  is  admissible  as  evidence  on 
its  merits,  and  leave  the  decision  of  what  is  to  be  regarded 


356        THE   RELATION   OF   MAN   TO   SOCIETY 

as  legally  right  or  wrong  in  the  particular  case  to  a  jury, 
or,  it  may  even  be,  to  themselves  as  mere  judges  of  fact. 
For  what  has  to  be  determined  here  is  just  how  a  reason- 
able person,  acting  as  other  reasonable  men  would  do, 
ought  to  have  conducted  himself. 

In  these,  as  in  other  instances,  the  province  of  law 
overlaps  part  of  the  province  of  a  different  kind  of  obliga- 
tion which  usually  has  no  legal  sanction  at  all,  and  may 
also  fall  far  short  of  the  obligations  of  conscience.  In 
this  latter  province,  a  far  more  extensive  one,  we  find  a 
system,  coloured  by  community  tradition,  in  which  also 
individual  conduct  is  regulated  and  controlled.  But  such 
control  has  in  most  cases  no  legal  sanction  attaching  to 
it,  notwithstanding  that  it  applies,  just  as  law  ought  to 
do,  to  all  the  members  of  society  alike  without  distinction 
of  person.  We  have  never  had  in  the  English  language 
a  distinctive  name  for  it,  and  this  has  been  unfortunate 
because  of  confusion  both  in  thought  and  expression 
which  has  arisen  from  defective  terminology.  In  German 
the  system  to  which  I  am  referring  has  been  marked  off 
as  that  of  Sittlichkeit.  This  is  the  system  of  habitual 
or  customary  conduct,  which  may  overlap  the  field  of 
much  of  what  is  covered  by  morality,  as  well  as  of  much 
of  what  falls  within  law,  and  which  embraces  all  these 
rules  for  conduct  on  the  part  of  members  of  a  community 
which  general  opinion  asserts  that  it  is  "  bad  form  "  or 
"  not  the  thing  "  to  disregard.  The  general  sense  attaches 
to  these  rules  a  sanction  to  this  extent,  that  the  man  who 
disregards  them  is  in  peril  of  being  "  cut,"  or  at  least  of 
being  looked  on  askance.  The  system  is  so  generally 
accepted  and  enforced  by  opinion  that  no  one  can  venture 
to  ignore  it  without  in  some  way  suffering  at  the  hands 
of  his  neighbours.  If  a  man  maltreats  his  wife  and 
children,  or  habitually  inconveniences  his  fellow-citizens 
in  the  public  streets,  he  is  pretty  sure  to  find  himself  the 
worse  off  in  the  end,  even  if  he  has  not  broken  any  law. 
It  not  only  does  not  pay  in  the  end  to  do  such  things,  but 
the  decent  man  does  not  wish  to  do  them.  What  he  looks 
to  is  the  standard  of  the  community  of  which  he  is  a 
member.  He  has  everywhere  around  him  an  object- 
lesson  in  the  conduct  of  respectable  people  in  the  com- 
munity to  which  he  and  they  belong.  Without  habitual 
self-restraint  on  the  part  of  the  natural  man,  that  is  the 


GOOD   FORM  357 

man  as  tending  to  yield  to  animal  impulses,  there  could  be 
no  tolerable  social  life,  and  real  freedom  for  human  society 
could  not  be  enjoyed. 

It  is  this  sense  of  obligation  towards  others,  not  merely 
subjective,  like  that  of  conscience,  and  not  external,  like 
that  of  law,  that  is  the  chief  foundation  of  freedom 
within  a  civilised  community,  and  also  of  the  institutional 
forms  of  such  a  community.  The  reality  of  the  system 
takes  shape  in  family  life  and  in  other  social  institutions. 
It  is  not  limited  to  particular  forms,  and  it  is  capable  of 
manifesting  itself  in  fresh  aspects  and  of  developing  and 
changing  old  ones.  The  civil  community  is  more  than 
a  mere  political  fabric.  It  includes  all  the  social  institu- 
tions in  and  by  which  individual  life  and  development 
are  influenced,  such  as  are  the  family,  the  school,  the 
church,  the  local  assembly.  It  extends  its  moulding 
influence  to  the  legislature  and  to  the  executive.  None  of 
these  can  subsist  adequately  in  isolation  from  the  others. 
They  embody  different  kinds  of  general  purpose,  and  are 
expressions  in  varying  forms  of  that  purpose  in  such  a 
fashion  that  society  appears  as  an  organic  whole  which 
includes  the  nation  and  may  extend  beyond  it. 

But  if  these  purposes  are  to  be  effectively  expressed 
they  must  themselves  be  living  and  effective  in  their  moving 
power.  For  if  they  become  feeble  the  institutions  of  which 
they  are  the  foundation  will  also  become  feeble  and 
begin  to  lose  cohesion.  Different  nations  excel  in  their 
Sittlichkeit  in  different  fashions.  The  spirit  of  a  great 
community  and  its  ideals  may  vary  from  those  of  other 
communities.  Moreover,  nations  sometimes  present  the 
spectacle  of  having  degenerated  in  this  respect.  The 
world  is  always  changing,  and  the  nations  within  it  change 
their  levels,  and  not  invariably  for  the  better. 

That  the  system  of  what  is  "  good  form  "  or  "  the  thing 
to  do  "  is  not  coincident  with  the  systems  of  morality  and 
law,  is  on  occasions  quite  apparent.  The  duel  has  been 
generally  condemned  in  this  country  both  by  morality 
and  by  law.  Yet  to  shrink  from  it  used  not  very  long 
since  to  be  what  social  opinion  could  not  tolerate.  That 
has  changed.  But  more  recently,  while  the  war  spirit 
was  at  its  height,  we  had  opportunities  of  observing 
the  same  phenomenon  of  antinomies  arising  between 
conscientious  conviction  and  social  opinion.  Some- 


358         THE   RELATION   OF   MAN   TO   SOCIETY 

thing  of  the  same  kind  is  true  of  gambling  and  gambling 
debts. 

What  is  essential  for  the  strength  of  such  a  system  of 
social  opinion  is  that  it  should  have  become  a  matter  of 
habit  and  of  second  nature.  The  well-behaved  person 
does  not  ordinarily  have  to  reflect  on  how  he  ought  to 
behave  himself.  Good  form,  in  the  street  or  in  the 
parlour,  is  with  him  almost  instinctive,  and  he  is  the 
more  appreciated  the  more  this  is  characteristic  of 
him.  For  his  action  is  neither  due  to  the  reflective  but 
unconstrained  dictates  of  his  conscience  on  the  one 
hand,  nor  to  his  knowledge  of  the  statute  book,  with  the 
penalties  it  prescribes,  on  the  other.  The  explanation 
of  his  fitness  to  be  a  member  of  society  is  that  he  is  no 
isolated  particle,  but  a  person  living  in  relation  to  his 
fellow  human  beings,  and  permeated  by  ends  held  in 
common  with  them,  by  which,  however  little  consciously, 
his  conduct  is  influenced  at  every  turn.  It  is  by  the 
fulness  of  the  life  of  the  whole  as  shown  in  his  activity 
that  he  is  judged,  and  his  individuality  becomes  larger 
and  not  smaller  by  his  acceptance  of  the  duties  he  owes 
to  those  around  him. 

The  self  is  thus  no  static  substance,  but  is  dynamic 
subject.  The  activity  of  such  a  subject  has  a  diversity  of 
forms.  It  is  reflective,  in  the  face  of  the  world  which  con- 
fronts it  and  in  which  it  exists.  But  it  is  also  a  moulding 
force  with  power  over  its  surroundings.  This  power  it 
exercises  when  it  wills  and  acts  in  furtherance  of  its  choice 
in  so  willing.  The  power  may  be  great  or  may  be  small. 
But  it  is  a  power  which  is  to  a  very  great  extent  exercised 
for  ends  and  through  means  to  these  ends  which  are 
identical  for  all  the  individual  subjects  who  constitute 
the  group  or  the  community.  For  the  self,  as  we  have 
seen,  is  what  it  is  in  the  region  and  at  a  level  of  knowledge 
which  is  identical  throughout  its  differences  in  diverse 
individuals.  The  ends  are  therefore  in  like  manner,  not 
mere  events  existing  in  externality  and  only  resembling 
each  other,  but  the  same  for  mind  in  its  multitudinous 
forms  of  self-expression.  Organisms  exist  separately  in 
space  and  time.  But  these,  even  though  unconscious, 
are  self-directed  in  the  fulfilment  of  ends  that  are  not 
external,  and  much  more  clearly  is  this  the  case  with 
what  we  distinguish  as  separate  intelligences  in  the 


THE  HUMAN   SOUL  359 

organisms  through  which  they  are  expressed.  The  soul 
that  has  reached  the  level  of  being  a  self  is  self-determining. 
Its  energy  is  of  a  nature  to  which  the  principle  of  con- 
servation that  rules  in  the  mechanical  world  has  no  appli- 
cation. Mind  as  we  observe  it  in  the  self  initiates,  and  in 
initiating  creates,  as  Bergson  and  others  have  impressed 
on  us.  The  self  is  not  only  capable  of  free  choice,  but, 
because  it  is  rational,  it  chooses  some  ends  in  preference 
to  others.  It  chooses  these  because  it  has  latent  in  it 
higher  standpoints  of  its  own  existence,  at  which  these 
ends  represent  for  it  good  as  distinguished  from  evil,  and 
beauty  as  distinguished  from  ugliness.  The  differences 
in  such  levels  are  apparent,  and,  while  we  are  free  to 
choose,  we  feel  ourselves  morally  and  aesthetically  impelled 
to  choose  what  is  better.  Difference  expresses  itself  in 
the  form  of  distinction  between  values,  and  these  values 
are  for  us  radical  facts.  When  perceived  we  cannot 
ignore  them  without  standing  self-condemned,  condemned 
that  is  to  say  by  our  higher  nature,  a  nature  which  we 
feel  an  obligation  to  awaken  and  to  keep  awake.  It  is 
in  this  sense  that  these  values  are  foundational,  just  as 
truth  is  foundational  in  theoretical  reflection.  Behind 
them  we  do  not  go.  We  may  misconceive  and  distort 
them,  just  as  we  may  fall  into  error  in  reasoning.  It  is 
of  our  nature  so  to  do,  for  we  are  free  agents  and  uncon- 
strained. But  back  to  them  we  come,  just  as  we  always 
in  the  end  seek  for  deliverance  from  error  and  for  the 
attainment  of  truth.  We  have  a  sense  of  moral  and 
aesthetic  responsibility,  just  as  we  have  the  sense  of 
intellectual  responsibility.  The  two  are  cognate,  and 
their  origin  is  the  fact  that  even  in  daily  life  the  self  has 
a  higher  level  than  that  of  simple  particularism. 

Just  as  we  find  the  nature  of  truth  to  lie  in  systematic 
as  distinguished  from  merely  fragmentary  apprehension, 
so  we  find  value  to  be  more  than  particular  in  its  character. 
The  individual  shapes  that  it  presents  have  as  their  dis- 
tinguishing quality  identity  in  their  differences.  Value 
implies  choice,  and  choice  in  fulfilment  of  a  consciously 
adopted  purpose.  It  therefore  implies  personality,  and 
is  no  attribute  that  can  belong  to  things  taken  in  abstrac- 
tion from  the  subject  to  which  they  are  present.  Value 
falls  within  the  domain  of  mind  as  such.  But  within 
this  domain  there  is  an  infinite  variety  in  the  nature  of 


360         THE   RELATION   OF   MAN  TO   SOCIETY 

value.  For  instance,  it  may  lie  in  the  quality  of  a 
pleasure,  or  it  may  consist  in  the  accepted  and  satisfying 
excellence  of  a  moral  action.  But  in  neither  case  is  the 
value  recognised  referred  for  its  standard  to  anything 
below  itself.  The  failure  of  hedonism  as  an  account  of  the 
facts  is  traceable  to  its  insistence  on  reference  to  a  lower 
standard,  quantity  of  satisfaction  as  the  explanation  of 
level.  Now  level,  or  the  degree  which  a  special  experience 
expresses,  is  not  something  external  to  degrees  that  are 
either  lower  or  higher,  so  as  to  be  capable  of  explanation 
by  genesis  ab  extra.  It  is  a  foundational  fact,  the  relation 
to  which  of  the  mind  that  is  fully  developed  is  recognised 
by  that  mind.  A  dog  does  not  make  this  recognition  in 
adequate  form  because  his  mind  is  not  adequate  to  human 
experience.  A  depraved  person  may  not  make  it,  for  his 
organic  character  may  have  debarred  his  soul  from  full 
development.  But  a  normal  human  being  recognises 
value  just  as  he  recognises  truth  or  any  other  form  of 
reality.  He  may  err,  for  he  is  free.  He  may  not  have 
it  in  him  to  appreciate  the  highest  forms.  That  is  because 
he  is  always  to  some  extent  conditioned  by  nature  and 
made  unequal  in  the  possession  of  her  gifts  to  his  more 
fortunate  fellow-men.  But  to  a  large  extent  he  is  capable 
of  truth  here  as  elsewhere,  and  if  he  were  not  he  would 
not  be  a  normal  human  being. 

Just  because  of  the  difference  between  the  capacities  of 
individuals  there  is  always  an  average  level  which  their 
groups  exhibit.  It  is  this  average  level  that  results  in  the 
standards  of  daily  life.  It  determines  what  we  look  for 
in  quality  of  conscience,  in  the  state  of  the  law,  and  in  the 
habitual  behaviour  which  does  not  fall  below  good  form 
in  the  group.  The  principles  or  rules  which  express  the 
average  and  minimum  level  at  which  the  citizen  is  expected 
to  comport  himself  do  not  possess  in  themselves  fixed 
values.  They  may  vary  as  the  groups  of  individuals  vary. 
But  they  are  the  expressions  in  general  or  objective  form 
of  what  the  relevant  values  mean  within  the  group.  They 
may  import  something  resembling  ethical  obligation  or 
aesthetic  standard.  In  any  case  they  stand  for  what  we 
think  ought  to  move  the  will  of  the  individuals  who  belong 
to  the  group,  be  it  a  nation  or  be  it  less.  They  import, 
too,  a  relation  to  the  existence  of  the  value  in  objective 
form.  Not,  it  may  well  be,  as  anything  external,  even  in 


SOCIAL   VALUES  861 

the  way  in  which  law  may  be  said  to  be  external,  but  as 
something  actual  in  a  high  aspect  of  individual  life,  an 
aspect  in  which  the  free  choice  of  the  individual  will  be 
what  is  characterised  by  value.  The  activity  of  mind  is 
here  no  mere  recognition  of  logical  or  of  external  sequence ; 
it  is  a  judgment  about  reality  made  for  practical  purposes, 
and  with  reference  to  what  exists.  It  is  not  concerned 
with  what  belongs  merely  to  the  particularism  of  the 
physical  organism  in  which  mind  expresses  itself  in  this 
man  or  that.  It  is  with  what  is  of  a  general  nature  and 
with  identities  in  human  purpose  that  this  kind  of  mental 
activity  is  concerned.  It  is  choice  in  accordance  with  a 
system,  and  such  a  system,  in  its  varying  forms,  is  the 
standard  by  which  we  condemn  or  approve  our  choice  in 
particular  instances.  The  value  of  man  as  a  rational 
being  thus  turns,  not  on  external  causation,  not  on  his 
impulses  as  a  living  organism,  but  on  his  capacity  to  rise 
above  these  impulses  in  controlling  himself,  and  to  become 
a  citizen  in  a  realm  of  higher  ends.  His  will  is  that  for 
the  exercise  of  which  he  is  deeply  responsible,  not  only  as 
regards  others,  but  to  himself  as  always  more  than  he 
seems  at  the  moment  to  be.  The  world  of  his  experience  is 
not  static ;  he  and  his  surroundings  may  both  be  changing ; 
what  exists  is  ever  in  process  of  becoming  superseded. 
And  yet  there  is  continuity  in  the  great  principles  on 
which  depends  the  value  of  human  ends,  alike  in  merely 
theoretical  knowledge  and  in  that  practical  form  of  know- 
ledge which  is  called  choice.  The  two  kinds  of  knowledge 
not  being  really  different  the  truth  for  both  is  of  the 
same  character,  and  is  what  for  us  finite  beings  at  all 
events  is  never  perfect.  All  we  can  be  sure  of  is  that  there 
are  certain  aspects  which  it  presents  that  are  foundational 
to  progress  and  ought  therefore  never  to  be  ignored.  It  is 
thus  that  values  are  for  us  not  only  objective,  but  in  certain 
phases  unquestionable.  What  ought  to  be  and  what  is 
tend  to  come  together. 

The  perplexity  that  is  common  about  the  reality  of 
values  arises  from  the  old  notion  that  the  mind  is  a  kind 
of  thing  that  is  confronted  by  some  external  authority 
in  its  choice  of  standards.  But  if  the  mind  has  its  definitive 
nature  as  subject  rather  than  substance,  and  in  its  self- 
creating  activity  exists  with  different  levels  of  outlook, 
the  control  in  the  selection  of  its  objects  and  in  its 


362         THE   RELATION   OF   MAN   TO   SOCIETY 

recognition  of  their  quality  is  one  that  belongs  to  itself  and 
falls  within  its  own  nature.  Whatever  the  character  of 
our  experience,  whether  it  be  theoretical  or  ethical  or 
aesthetic,  it  seems  everywhere  to  disclose  as  actual  varying 
degrees  in  that  character  and  in  our  kinds  of  knowledge. 
According  to  the  level  which  predominates  we  classify 
the  people  with  whom  we  come  into  contact.  They  do 
not  exist  in  any  one  form  alone,  and  the  worst  of  them  is 
potentially  better  than  he  seems  to  be.  They  exhibit 
many  incongruities  in  both  mind  and  character.  But  we 
classify  them  according  to  what  seems  to  predominate, 
often  wrongly,  from  want  of  variety  and  scope  in  our  own 
outlook,  but  still  with  definite  standards  before  our  minds. 
One  set  of  persons  in  the  main  pursues  pleasure  of  a  lower 
order  ;  another  that  of  a  higher  nature.  There  are  those 
who  are  the  creatures  of  their  surroundings  ;  there  are 
others  who  live  lives  that  are  dedicated  to  high  callings. 
Some  are  for  the  most  part  content  to  remain  under  the 
shadow  of  self ;  there  are  others  whose  very  existence  is 
an  apparently  unbroken  record  of  decisions  that  have  no 
reference  to  their  private  interests.  And  so  it  is  also 
with  relative  capacity  for  the  appreciation  of  the  beautiful 
and  the  true.  In  the  main  we  classify  through  the  kind 
of  conception  that  seems  to  dominate  the  end  pursued, 
just  as  we  classify  the  kinds  of  knowledge  by  the  concep- 
tions under  which  it  proceeds  in  the  investigation  of  reality. 
The  ends  which  obtain  in  choice  and  the  abstractions  neces- 
sarily made  in  reflection  are  alike  those  of  a  plurality  of 
orders  which  can  neither  be  reduced  to  orders  below  them 
nor  be  treated  as  indistinguishable  without  confusion  being 
the  result.  The  difference  between  Portia  and  Sir  John 
Falstaff  is  one  not  of  quantity  but  of  quality,  and  it  is  a 
difference  that  rests  on  principles  that  are  foundational  to 
ethical  judgment. 

It  is  difficult  to  make  this  kind  of  abstract  statement 
about  such  difference  in  point  of  principles  seem  alive 
when  it  is  expressed  in  merely  theoretical  terms.  It  may 
therefore  be  worth  while  to  turn  to  an  example  of  its  em- 
bodiment in  that  "  most  perfect  form  of  speech,"  poetry. 
Of  such  examples  there  are  many,  but  one  of  the  best  is 
that  afforded  by  the  second  part  of  Faust. 

Goethe  disliked  philosophy  eo  nomine.  Yet  that  great 
critic  of  life  and  knowledge  had  a  penetrating  insight  into 


GOETHE'S   FAUST  363 

the  substance  of  metaphysics.  He  had  not  only  studied 
Spinoza  and,  to  some  extent,  Kant,  but  he  was  intimate 
with  Schiller,  whose  interest  in  these  things  was  keen, 
and,  as  readers  of  his  correspondence  with  Zelter  know, 
he  had  seen  much  of  Hegel. 

As  I  have  already  pointed  out  by  reference  to  the 
passage  quoted  at  p.  227  from  the  Spruche  in  Prosa, 
Goethe  had  grasped  the  difference  which  separates  the 
categories  of  mechanism  from  the  higher  categories,  and 
distorts,  when  we  do  not  keep  this  difference  in  kind 
before  the  mind,  our  observation  of  facts.  And  he  also 
understood  the  soul  that  is  conscious  of  high  potentialities 
in  range  and  destiny,  the  soul  of  man  at  his  best,  and  that 
nothing  enduring  or  satisfying  can  be  hoped  for  from 
merely  piling  up  quantities  of  pleasure.  That  is  why  the 
Deity,  in  the  "  Prologue  in  Heaven  "  at  the  beginning  of 
the  first  part  of  the  poem,  tells  Mephistopheles,  in  the  first 
place,  that  He,  the  Lord,  attaches  a  certain  value  to  the 
ceaseless  activity  of  the  devil,  in  so  far  as  it  keeps  man, 
always  prone  to  err,  from  relapsing  into  slumber.  But 
He  then  goes  on,  after  warning  the  devil  that  he  is  too 
ignorant  of  higher  things  to  succeed  in  the  end,  to  address 
to  humanity,  the  true  child  of  God,  the  injunction  that  in 
enjoying  the  riches  of  life  it  must  never  cease  in  the 
endeavour  to  hold  these  riches  in  bonds  of  love,  and  to 
set  the  transient  nature  of  what  is  passing  in  thoughts 
that  belong  to  the  eternal. 

The  first  part  of  the  story  of  Faust  is,  as  we  might 
expect  from  this,  the  record  of  a  complete  failure  on  the 
part  of  Mephistopheles.  To  the  high-trained  scholar, 
restored  to  his  youth,  but  still  a  developed  soul,  he  offers 
pleasure  piled  upon  pleasure,  culminating  in  the  seduction 
of  the  innocent  Gretchen.  It  is  all  in  vain.  There  is  no 
point  at  which  Faust  can  be  brought  to  say  to  the 
moment,  "  Stay,  thou  art  fair."  Sensual  enjoyment 
cannot  prove  for  such  a  soul  an  enduring  good.  Faust 
is  disgusted  with  it. 

The  second  part  of  the  poem  opens  with  the  temptation 
spread  in  more  subtle  forms.  Faust,  who  is  found  sleeping 
in  the  surroundings  of  beautiful  nature,  where  he  has  been 
sprinkled  by  the  spirits  with  the  waters  of  forgetfulness,  is 
awakened  to  new  adventures.  He  enters  into  the  life  of 
Courts,  and  becomes  powerful  and  wealthy.  His  intelli- 


364         THE   RELATION   OF   MAN  TO   SOCIETY 

gence  demands  something  more  perfect  than  the  forms  of 
art  in  his  own  period.  He  is  transported  to  the  surround- 
ings of  Ancient  Greece,  and  is  united  to  Helen  of  Troy. 
Greek  beauty  is  made  to  come  to  life  again  for  him.  But 
this  has  been  accomplished  only  for  his  own  individual 
development,  and  for  that  alone  he  has  sought  it.  Such 
concentration  on  self  cannot  satisfy.  There  are  higher 
standards.  He  is  rich  and  powerful,  if  now  old.  He  can 
command  what  he  pleases.  The  devil  suggests  to  him 
that  he  should  build  a  castle  and  live  there,  surrounded 
with  every  source  of  enjoyment,  looked  up  to  by  all  men, 
and  made  famous  by  the  poets.  But  the  suggestion  fails. 
Faust  replies  : 

"  Die  That  1st  allea, 
Nichts  der  Ruhm, 

Von  Allem  1st  dir  Nichta  gewahrt 
Was  weisst  du,  was  der  Mensch  begehrt, 
Dein  widrig  Wesen,  bitter,  scharf, 
Was  weiss  es,  was  der  Mensch  bedarf." 

Finally  Faust  comes  to  a  decision.  He  has  formed  a 
plan  of  shutting  out  the  sea  from  land  of  his  which  it  is 
overflowing,  and  so  of  increasing  the  extent  of  ground  that 
can  be  cultivated.  But  in  getting  this  done,  through  no 
evil  intention  of  his  own  he  turns  out  to  have  inflicted 
cruel  suffering  on  innocent  people.  He  is  now  old.  Care 
breathes  on  him  and  blinds  him,  and  he  realises  that  in 
this  blindness  he  is  submitting  to  what  is  some  equivalent 
for  the  pain  he  has  caused.  He  feels  that  it  is  now  for 
others  that  he  must  use  his  power  and  riches,  and  no  longer 
for  himself,  and  relief  comes  to  his  soul : 

"  Die  Nacht  scheint  tiefer  tief  hereinzudringen 

Allem  im  Innern  leuchtet  helles  Licht ; 
Was  ich  gedacht,  ich  eil'  es  zu  vollbringen  ; 
Des  Herren  Wort,  es  gibt  allein  Gewicht." 

He  orders  the  work  of  reclamation  to  be  pressed  on. 
He  cannot  now  see  its  progress,  but  reports  are  brought 
to  him.  The  land  is  being  won  from  the  ocean,  and  it  will 
become  fertile  and  remain  so  if  those  for  whom  he  has 
won  it  by  using  his  power  and  wealth  will  daily  work  to 
keep  the  dams  he  has  made  in  repair,  so  that  the  tide 
may  be  held  back.  This  gives  him  a  new  view  of  human 


FAUST  365 

happiness,  the  sense  of  well-being  that  is  to  be  gained, 
not  by  the  attainment  of  some  permanent  and  final  result 
that  will  remain  so  apart  from  daily  effort,  but  of  one  that 
is  to  be  preserved  intact  only  by  work  regularly  done.  It 
is  by  giving  them  surroundings  in  which  they  may  reap 
the  fruits  of  sustained  and  unbroken  effort  and  of  the 
quality  in  it,  that  he  feels  he  has  at  last  discovered  the 
true  fountain  of  happiness  for  them  and  himself  alike.  He 
breaks  out  into  what  is  to  be  the  final  exclamation  of  his 
old  age  : 

"  Ja  !    diesem  Sinne  bin  ich  ganz  ergeben, 
Das  ist  der  Weisheit  letzter  Schluss, 
Nur  der  verdient  sich  Freiheit  wie  das  Leben, 
Der  taglich  sie  erobern  muss. 
Und  so  verbringt,  umrungen  von  Gefahr, 
Hier  Kindheit,  Mann  und  Greiss  sein  tucntig  Jahr. 
Solch  ein  Gewimmel  mocht'  ich  sehn, 
Auf  freiem  Grund  mit  freiem  Volke  stehn. 
Zum  Augenblicke  durft'  ich  sagen  : 
Verweile  doch,  du  bist  so  schon  !  " 

He  falls  back  dead.  Satan  thinks  the  condition  of  the 
original  bond  has  been  satisfied.  But  he  is  wrong.  It 
was  not  in  any  sense  that  he  has  comprehended  that 
Faust  has  said  to  the  moment,  "  Stay,  thou  art  fair."  It 
was  because  he  has  risen  at  last  to  a  higher  level  of 
spiritual  existence,  a  level  at  which  when  attained  his 
redemption  has  been  worked  out.  Quantity  is  superseded. 
A  new  order  has  been  reached,  an  order  that  belongs  not 
to  time  but  to  eternity : 

"  Alles  Vergangliche 
Ist  nur  ein  Gleichniss ; 
Das  Unzulangliche 
Hier  wird's  Ereigniss ; 
Das  Unbeschreibliche 
Hier  ist  es  gethan." 

I  have  quoted  the  second  part  of  Faust  because  it 
illustrates  in  pictorial  form  what  I  have  meant  in  speaking 
of  different  kinds  of  experience,  and  by  the  underlying 
conceptions  which  these  kinds  embody  as  distinctive  of 
them.  Thought  and  conduct  alike  disclose  themselves  as 
expressive  of  a  variety  of  standpoints  fundamentally 
differing.  No  one  realised  this  more  keenly  than  Goethe, 
and  what  we  find  in  him  we  find  also  in  Wordsworth,  in 
Browning,  and  in  many  of  the  reflective  poets  of  the  Vic- 
25 


366        THE  RELATION  OF  MAN  TO  SOCIETY 

torian  era.  Goethe  expressed  the  doctrine  more  definitely 
than  others,  because  his  mind  was  pre-eminently  of  a 
reflective  character.  In  Faust  he  works  out  his  doctrine 
of  Redemption,  as  self-emancipation  from  lower  to  higher, 
progressively  attained.  For  Faust  the  new  heart  and  the 
right  spirit  that  were  what  was  needful  for  salvation  came 
by  slow  degrees  and  only  after  a  long  and  sustained  effort. 
But  they  came  at  last  because,  and  only  because,  the 
approach  to  the  divine  in  man  made  them  possible,  by 
virtue  of  controlling  ends  which  he  dwells  on  agaiR  and 
again,  not  only  in  Faust,  but  in  his  lyrical  verses.  There 
is  little  attempt  made  by  Goethe  to  throw  the  lessons  he 
taught  into  systematic  or  even  consistent  form.  But  his 
success  shows  how,  in  the  hands  of  a  great  artist  who 
is  also  a  great  thinker,  metaphor  and  symbol  may  be 
made  potent  as  influences  for  awakening  in  the  mind  a 
sense  of  the  highest  of  which  it  is  capable. 


CHAPTER    XVII 

THE    INDIVIDUAL   AND    THE    STATE 

Is  there  a  General  Will  ?  This  is  a  question  which  has 
given  rise  to  much  controversy,  and  to  a  discussion  which 
shows  no  sign  of  abatement.  But  much  of  the  dispute 
has  apparently  arisen  from  some  of  the  parties  in  battle 
array  insisting  on  attributing  to  others  views  which  they 
do  not  hold.  If  it  is  assumed  that  the  mind  is  a  self- 
contained  and  exclusive  particular  thing,  that  subsists 
with  no  relations  to  other  selves  excepting  those  that 
belong  to  externality,  then  it  is  obvious  that  there  is  no 
entity  apart  which  can  properly  be  called  a  general  will. 
At  most  there  can  be  resemblance  of  purpose-like  activities 
which,  if  they  can  be  called  common  activities,  can  be  so 
called  only  in  the  sense  that  they  resemble,  in  the  way 
in  which  outside  things  resemble  each  other.  What  we 
have  on  this  footing  is  analogy  only.  The  question  of  a 
general  will  in  any  other  sense  cannot  properly  arise 
because  its  exclusion  has  been  begged  at  the  outset. 

But  suppose  that  this  exclusion  cannot  be  conceded  ! 
Suppose  that  the  true  nature  of  the  self  is  that  discussed 
earlier  !  Suppose  that  the  everyday  distinction  between 
selves  takes  its  rise  primarily  in  difference  of  organism  ! 
What  then  ?  It  has  already  been  pointed  out  that  such 
a  view  does  not  necessarily  imply  that  the  self  is  something 
merely  superinduced  on  the  organism.  The  latter  may 
present  itself  at  degrees  of  various  kinds  in  its  reality, 
and  so  may  present  itself  as  mind.  If  mind  can  recognise 
mind  as  included  in  its  object-world,  that  is  easily  intelli- 
gible. I  may  find  identity  in  thought  between  John 
Smith  and  myself,  identity  so  tempered  by  difference  as 
to  give  rise  to  a  correspondence  based  on  genuine  sameness 
pro  tanto.  If  the  principle  of  degrees  be  one  which 
characterises  the  entire  universe,  including  knowledge 
and  its  object  alike,  that  is  a  natural  inference.  It 

367 


868  THE   INDIVIDUAL  AND  THE   STATE 

results  from  the  character  of  mind,  which  is  that  not  of  a 
thing  but  of  an  intellectual  activity  which  reaches  over 
the  whole  of  the  universe  of  discourse  to  which  it  gives 
meaning,  and  creates  for  itself  the  distinction  between  the 
self  that  knows  and  the  reality  of  what  it  knows.  To 
this  universe  of  discourse  reflection  sets  no  limit.  The 
self  may  be  known  as  well  as  know,  and  the  distinction 
is  its  own  work.  It  is  only  when  the  self  is  taken  to  be 
no  more  than  a  static  thing  with  position  in  space  and 
time,  and  when  knowledge  is  assumed  to  be  a  property  of 
such  a  thing,  that  we  fall  into  trouble. 

If  this  be  so  the  problem  of  community  in  will  between 
John  Smith  and  myself  presents  a  further  aspect.  In  the 
same  sense  as  we  think  identically  we  will  identically.  For 
mind  apprehending  and  mind  expressing  itself  in  choice 
are  not  separate  entities.  Thoughts  and  choices  are  not 
events  in  an  external  world.  Their  consequences  may  be 
different,  but  with  these  consequences  they  must  not 
themselves  be  confused. 

If  minds  are  no  longer  thought  of  as  exclusive  things, 
with  separate  spatial  and  temporal  positions,  the  doctrine 
of  a  general  will  becomes  less  difficult.  It  can  be  no 
outside  compelling  power,  but  must  be  just  the  corre- 
spondence between  volitions.  Alike  such  volitions  stand 
for  activity  in  thought,  however  much  the  consequences 
due  to  such  activity  are  distinguishable.  John  Smith 
and  I  and  our  fellow-citizens  co-operate  in  virtue  of 
identity  in  intelligence.  It  is  a  question  not  of  things 
but  of  thoughts.  The  result  of  our  co-operation  in  the 
activities  which  follow  on  our  conclusions  is  our  joint 
contribution  to  the  organisation  of  society  and  of  the 
state  and  the  institutions  that  are  social  and  political. 
These  institutions  are  thus  the  embodiments  of  really 
common  purpose.  They  are  fully  intelligible  only  at  the 
degrees  in  knowledge  and  reality  which  are  those  of  the 
mind  they  express.  In  them  mind  thus  finds  itself,  as 
Aristotle  said  long  ago.  In  them  I  and  you  are  spiritually 
coincident,  and  it  is  spiritual  and  not  physical  coincidence 
with  which  we  are  here  concerned.  At  the  level  of  reality 
at  which  we  stand  when  we  recognise  society  and  the 
state,  we  recognise  just  ourselves  and  others  as  fellow- 
citizens  who  think  the  same  thoughts  and  make  the  same 
decisions. 


THE  GENERAL  WILL  369 

It  is  thus  that  we  get  to  the  common  will.  It  is  nothing 
apart  from  our  own  wills.  It  is  just  our  own  wills  at  their 
social  level.  Of  course  the  purposes  are  largely  concerned 
with  what  lies  beyond  our  individual  control,  just  as  merely 
theoretical  knowledge  is  concerned  with  a  field  that 
stretches  far  beyond  the  actual  capacity  of  the  individual. 
Various  degrees  of  reality  may  be  disclosed  by  the  objects 
of  the  common  will.  Our  reflection  and  volition  both 
imply  plurality  in  level.  It  is  not  in  every  aspect  of  our 
world  that  the  identity  is  obvious  that  is  characteristic  of 
mind,  or  for  that  matter  even  of  its  correspondences.  For 
we  are  separate  organisms,  notwithstanding  that  these 
organisms  express  intelligence  and  behave  as  doing  so. 
It  is  only  when  we  confine  ourselves  to  the  category  of 
substance,  and  so  are  held  to  the  level  of  wThich  that 
category  is  determinant,  that  the  principle  on  which  the 
reality  of  a  common  will  rests  is  difficult  to  understand. 
As  interpreted  by  reference  to  the  doctrine  of  degrees  it 
is  a  natural  consequence  of  that  doctrine. 

It  follows  not  less  plainly  that  the  general  will  is  some- 
thing quite  other  than  the  sum  of  the  wills  of  all.  That 
is  because  we  are  not  here  in  the  region  of  arithmetic. 
The  general  will  is  no  aggregate,  for  it  is  not  numerically 
different  from  the  individual  wills  in  which  it  expresses 
itself.  It  is,  as  we  have  seen,  just  these  wills  interpreted 
in  their  correspondence.  Many  attacks  in  detail  on  the 
principle  would  have  been  found  to  be  beside  the  point 
if  this  had  been  more  widely  seen  to  be  a  possible 
explanation.  For  the  real  attack  must  then  have  been 
transferred  to  the  issue  that  arises  earlier,  that  as  to  the 
actual  nature  of  mind  and  of  the  distinctions  between  its 
objects.  If  these  distinctions  are  merely  numerical,  and 
are  between  occurrences  in  space  and  time,  then  one  set 
of  consequences  ensues.  If  the  distinctions  belong,  on 
the  other  hand,  to  reflection  and  fall  within  it,  in  forms 
appropriate  to  the  different  categories,  then  quite  another 
kind  of  inference  forces  itself  on  us. 

I  propose,  therefore,  in  the  rest  of  what  I  have  to  say 
in  this  chapter,  to  proceed  on  the  footing  that  I  need  not 
restate  the  reasons  which  have  led  me  to  accept  the  latter 
alternative.  I  shall  treat  mind  as  what  can  be  described 
only  in  language  that  is  appropriate  to  mind  and  to  no 
mere  thing,  just  as  I  spoke  of  life  as  capable  of  description 


370  THE   INDIVIDUAL   AND   THE   STATE 

only  in  the  language  of  life.  And  I  shall  speak  of  reflec- 
tion and  volition,  not  as  events  in  a  non-mental  world,  but 
as  activities  that  fall  within  mind  as  such. 

The  first  question  to  which  I  wish  to  turn  is  one  as  to 
the  character  of  sovereignty  within  the  state.  Here  we 
find  ourselves  in  a  whirlpool  of  controversy.  The  school 
of  monists  insists  that  the  state  is  one  and  that  its 
sovereignty  is  one  and  indivisible.  They  affirm  that 
sovereignty  may  be  delegated,  but  that  its  source  is  a 
single  source,  the  power  of  the  state  as  the  final  form  of 
social  unity.  Those  who  call  themselves  pluralists,  on  the 
other  hand,  declare  that  the  state,  so  far  as  it  is  a  totality, 
manifests  itself  in  a  plurality  of  forms,  corporate,  quasi- 
corporate,  and  otherwise,  and  that  sovereignty  is  broken 
up  and  distributed  among  these.  That  there  is  one  form 
which  is  nominally  supreme  from  the  point  of  view  of 
legality  is  not  decisive.  For  the  theoretical  legal  power 
which  is  exercised  by  a  constitutionally  supreme  body 
representing  the  state,  such  as,  for  example,  the  British 
Parliament,  consisting  of  King,  Lords  and  Commons, 
cannot  really  be  exercised  so  as  to  dominate  the  power  of 
other  organisations  of  which  the  constitution  is  forced  to 
take  account.  In  days  that  at  all  events  once  were,  the 
Parliament  had  to  stand  in  awe  of  the  Church.  It  could 
not  secure  obedience  to  its  decrees  from  the  people  unless 
the  people  were  satisfied  that  the  command  of  Parliament 
was  not  in  conflict  with  the  command  of  God,  given  through 
the  Church.  And  to-day  the  pluralists  point  to  the  power 
of  such  bodies  as  the  Trade  Unions,  and  to  the  fact  that, 
with  the  developed  prominence  of  industrial  influence, 
Parliament  can  only  control  these  effectively  within  narrow 
limits. 

Whichever  of  these  two  views  is  right,  I  think  that 
neither,  at  all  events  in  its  extreme  form,  is  wide  enough 
to  fit  the  facts.  If  the  source  of  the  power  of  the  state 
and  of  the  reality  of  the  state  is  the  embodiment  of  common 
purposes  entertained  by  the  people  who  constitute  it,  that 
source  can  only  be  a  general  will,  such  as  has  been  referred 
to  above,  and  the  true  source  of  sovereignty  must  be  simply 
public  or  general  opinion.  Now  general  opinion  is  not 
always  easy  to  diagnose  and  ascertain.  It  has  a  history, 
and  it  often  fluctuates  rapidly.  It  may  have  entrusted  a 
particular  body  of  men  with  the  duty  of  carrying  its 


SOVEREIGNTY  371 

decisions  into  effect,  and  it  may  appear,  say  in  the  pro- 
gramme nominally  endorsed  at  a  general  election,  to 
have  expressed  itself  and  to  have  given  authority  for 
the  execution  of  its  decrees.  But  none  the  less  it  may 
not  really  have  done  so.  One  of  the  most  delicate  and 
difficult  tasks  confided  to  a  newly-elected  Ministry  is  to 
determine  what  mandate  has  really  been  given.  Not 
only  may  that  mandate  be  really  different  from  what 
it  appeared  to  be  from  the  language  at  the  time  em- 
ployed by  those  who  gave  it,  but  it  may  be  undergoing 
rapid  and  yet  silent  modification.  This  implies  that  it  is 
the  general  opinion  of  the  nation  at  the  time  when  action 
has  to  be  taken  that  is  the  ultimate  source  of  authority, 
and  that  under  a  constitution  like  our  own  such  opinion 
has  to  be  interpreted,  not  as  crystallised,  but  by  continuous 
exegesis  directed  to  ascertaining  what  it  has  become. 
Those  who  originally  expressed  opinions,  perhaps  even 
violently,  may  not  really  have  intended  to  give  a  final 
decision  or  one  that  was  meant  to  endure.  They  may 
have  felt  the  points  at  issue  to  be  too  obscure,  and  have 
meant  that  the  Ministers  in  effect  chosen  should  decide 
for  them  what  modifications  of  existing  decisions  and  what 
further  and  fresh  decisions  might  be  required.  And  if  the 
Ministers  fail  to  perform  this  function  for  those  who 
intended  them  to  do  so,  they  may  be  held  deeply  responsible 
for  the  failure,  and  may  not  be  allowed  to  excuse  them- 
selves by  pointing  to  spoken  or  written  words  as  having 
been  approved  at  the  time  of  a  general  election. 

It  is  not  enough  to  say  that  in  the  ballot  boxes  a 
numerical  majority  of  votes  for  a  particular  plan  was 
found.  For  it  may  have  become  obvious  that  these  votes 
did  not  represent  a  clear  or  enduring  state  of  mind.  The 
history  of  the  questions  at  such  an  election  and  the  changes 
in  their  context  have  therefore  to  be  taken  into  account. 
A  real  majority  rule  is  never  a  mere  mob  rule.  The 
people  is  not  a  simple  aggregate  of  momentary  voices  but 
is  a  whole,  and  it  is  this  character  that  governs  its  mani- 
festations of  opinion.  Representative  and  responsible 
government  is  thus  a  complicated  and  difficult  matter,  and, 
if  it  is  to  be  adequately  carried  out,  requires  great  tact 
and  insight,  as  well  as  great  courage  ;  qualities  which  the 
people  of  a  country  like  our  own  have  become  trained  to 
understand  and  to  appreciate.  No  abstract  rules  for 


372  THE  INDIVIDUAL  AND  THE   STATE 

interpretation  can  take  the  place  of  these  essential  qualities 
of  character  in  the  statesman. 

The  reason  of  the  discrepancy  is  just  the  manifold 
nature  of  the  mind  of  the  individual  voter  and  its  self- 
developing  and  self-changing  mode  of  evolution.  It  is 
this  that  the  statesman  has  to  study  if  he  would  get  at 
the  real  general  will  of  the  people.  That  will  may  even 
be  to  devolve  to  him  the  duty  of  taking  the  initiative  and 
of  acting  for  his  clients  freely,  as  a  man  of  courage  and 
high  intelligence  should  act,  and  he  may  have  been  chosen 
more  on  the  ground  of  faith  in  his  possession  of  these 
qualities  than  in  order  that  he  might  take  some  specific 
action  which  the  nation  feels  that  it  has  not  adequately 
thought  out.  Democracy,  even  in  its  most  complete  and 
thoroughgoing  form,  may  imply  all  this. 

Now  if  this  is  true  there  may  be  a  great  difference 
between  the  theoretical  and  the  actual  power  of  legis- 
lation, and  the  same  may  be  the  case  with  the  executive 
government.  Under  a  system  of  administration  like  our 
own  there  are  well-known  constitutional  limitations  on 
legal  power.  Theoretically  the  King  may  do  many  things, 
individual  acts  apparently  of  his  own  initiative,  to  which, 
if  it  could  be  proved  legally  that  he  had  done  them,  the 
Judges  in  the  Courts  would  have  to  give  effect.  But  if 
the  King  were  to  purport  to  enact  a  law  at  Buckingham 
Palace  merely  by  himself,  the  Judges  might  well  say  that 
they  were  forbidden  by  the  law  of  evidence  as  it  stands 
in  our  own  time  from  even  looking  at  a  law  effected  in 
such  a  form,  inasmuch  as  there  was  before  them  no  legal 
proof  that  the  King  had  made  a  law.  In  the  days  that 
followed  the  Norman  Conquest  the  rule  might  have  been 
otherwise,  and  James  the  First  at  least  held  views  which 
were  essentially  at  variance  with  it.  In  his  time  the 
doctrine  of  the  prerogative  was  advanced  to  such  a  point 
that  it  was,  for  certain  purposes  at  all  events,  unquestion- 
able in  the  law  courts.  Bacon  himself  suggested  that  the 
Judges,  though  they  be  "  lions,"  yet  should  be  "  lions 
under  the  throne,  being  circumspect  that  they  do  not 
check  or  oppose  any  points  of  sovereignty."  But  it  was 
not  long  before  the  general  sense  of  the  British  Community, 
as  interpreted  by  the  Judges  generally,  led  the  latter  to 
refuse  to  recognise  any  legislative  action  by  the  Crown, 
unless  clothed  in  a  form  provided  by  Parliament,  or 


THE   CONSTITUTION  373 

expressed  in  some  fashion  established  by  Parliamentary 
sanction,  as  capable  of  being  proved  before  them.  It 
became  necessary  that  every  such  measure  should  appear 
as  brought  forward  on  the  face  of  it  in  the  shape  of  legis- 
lation by  the  King,  by  and  with  the  advice  and  consent 
of  the  Lords  and  Commons  assembled  in  Parliament  itself. 
The  King  could  still  in  theory  legislate,  but  the  only 
possible  proof  of  his  having  done  so  was  the  production  of  a 
constitutional  form  that  had  the  aspect  of  a  Parliamentary 
Act.  If  it  could  have  been  proved  otherwise  that  he 
had  enacted  something,  it  does  not  appear  theoretically 
that  the  Judges  could  have  refused  to  give  effect  to  it. 
But  a  gradually  evolved  rule  of  constitutional  evidence 
became  by  degrees  equivalent  to  a  principle  which  had 
all  the  force  of  a  rule  of  substantive  law. 

In  the  same  way  the  King  might  conceivably  of  his  own 
initiative  make  a  treaty,  but  the  Judges  would  require 
proof  of  this  by  the  production  of  a  document  sealed  with  his 
Great  Seal,  which  is,  though  not  constitutionally  under  his 
personal  control,  the  only  admissible  legal  evidence  of  the 
King  having  so  acted.  In  other  cases  the  counter-signature 
of  a  Secretary  of  State  becomes  requisite  for  proof  of 
an  exercise  of  royal  authority  under  the  sign  manual. 

It  is  in  these  ways  that  in  a  country  with  an  unwritten 
constitution  like  ours  the  law  and  the  constitution, 
which  are  often  at  variance  in  their  language,  are  brought 
into  harmony.  It  was  Paley  who  wrote,  even  in  his 
Moral  Philosophy  published  in  1785,  these  words  : 

"  In  the  British,  and  possibly  in  all  other  constitutions, 
there  exists  a  wide  difference  between  the  actual  state  of 
the  Government  and  the  theory.  The  one  results  from 
the  other  ;  but  still  they  are  different.  When  we  contem- 
plate the  Theory  of  the  British  Government,  we  see  the 
King  invested  with  the  most  absolute  personal  impunity  ; 
with  a  power  of  rejecting  laws,  which  have  been  resolved 
on  by  both  Houses  of  Parliament ;  of  conferring  by  his 
charter,  upon  any  set  or  succession  of  men  he  pleases, 
the  privilege  of  sending  representatives  into  one  House 
of  Parliament,  as  by  his  immediate  appointment  he  can 
place  whom  he  will  in  the  other.  What  is  this,  a  foreigner 
might  ask,  but  a  mere  circuitous  despotism  ?  Yet,  when 
we  turn  our  attention  from  the  legal  existence  to  the 


874  THE   INDIVIDUAL  AND  THE   STATE 

actual  exercise  of  royal  authority  in  England,  we  see  these 
formidable  prerogatives  dwindled  into  mere  ceremonies  ; 
and,  in  their  stead,  a  sure  and  commanding  influence,  of 
which  the  constitution,  it  seems,  is  totally  ignorant, 
growing  out  of  that  enormous  patronage,  which  the 
increased  extent  and  opulence  of  the  Empire  has  placed 
in  the  disposal  of  the  executive  magistrate." 

The  representatives  of  the  nation  assembled  in  Parlia- 
ment can  thus,  by  indirect  as  well  as  direct  methods,  make 
what  is  theoretical  power  keep  within  the  boundaries  of 
what  is  desired  by  the  nation,  and  the  Judges,  by  applying 
law,  much  of  which  is  in  truth  judge-made,  co-operate  in 
giving  effect  to  the  process.  But  the  Parliament  itself, 
and  even  the  administration  which  has  its  full  confidence, 
are  themselves  also  subject  to  limitations  on  their  powers 
of  a  kind  that  are  not  what  is  technically  called  constitu- 
tional, but  are  yet  of  a  highly  potent  character.  I  have 
referred  to  the  influence  in  the  past  of  the  Church,  and  of 
the  Trade  Unions  in  our  own  time.  But  there  are  other 
forms  in  which  opinion  takes  shape  that  have  to  be 
reckoned  with.  Tradition  still  bulks  for  a  great  deal. 
There  are  financial  usages  from  which  Cabinets  are  chary 
of  departing,  for  fear  of  public  prejudice,  even  though 
such  departure  may  be  the  only  way  of  securing  both 
economy  and  efficiency.  This  is  one  of  the  sources  of 
what  is  called  "  red  tape."  It  has  been  so  done  in  the 
past,  therefore  it  must  be  so  done  to-day.  Again,  there 
is  a  good  deal  of  attention  paid  to  past  practice,  and  also 
to  sentiment,  even  when  it  is  the  sentiment  of  people  who 
have  not  much  power.  That  is  characteristic  of  the 
British  nation  generally,  and  not  merely  of  the  rulers  it 
chooses.  But  its  Parliament  has  often  displayed  this 
tendency  on  a  large  scale.  Walpole  and  his  Whig  col- 
leagues were  devoid  of  bigotry.  Yet  Walpole  would  not 
consent  to  relieve  the  Dissenters  from  the  Test  Act, 
although  they  were  his  warm  supporters  and  asked  for 
such  relief.  Most  sensible  people  have  all  along  wanted 
the  Jews  to  be  freed  from  political  disabilities  ;  yet  it 
could  not  be  done  for  a  very  long  time.  Catholic  emanci- 
pation was  altogether  unreasonably  delayed.  The  story 
of  Roman  ecclesiastical  titles  in  this  country  is  a  familiar 
one.  The  Act  prohibiting  these  was  likely  to  prove  a 


PUBLIC  OPINION  375 

dead  letter  from  the  beginning,  and  yet  it  was  passed,  on 
sentimental  grounds.  To-day  much  of  our  legislation 
about  aliens  is  probably  altogether  in  excess  of  public 
opinion,  but  it  is  the  tradition  of  the  days  in  which  that 
legislation  was  brought  forward  that  it  should  be  insisted 
on.  The  explanation  of  these  things,  and  of  other  political 
phenomena  of  the  kind,  is  not  brutal  selfishness,  or  in- 
difference. It  is,  as  Hume  pointed  out  long  ago  in  his 
Essays,  that  "  though  men  be  much  governed  by  interest, 
yet  even  interest  itself,  and  all  human  affairs,  are  entirely 
governed  by  opinion"  Opinion  has  moulded  the  action 
of  Parliament  and  also  the  common  law  which  the  Judges 
administer.  It  has  influenced  administration  at  every 
turn.  The  more  it  is  observed  in  the  results  of  its  opera- 
tion, the  more  apparent  does  it  become  that  opinion  is 
the  fountain  from  which  flows  power  and  in  which  the 
true  source  of  sovereignty  is  to  be  sought.  Opinion  may 
create  capacity  or  it  may  restrict  it  or  distribute  it.  All 
these  things  it  does  continuously.  It  is  the  perception 
of  dependence  on  opinion  that  restrains  Cabinets  and 
Parliaments  from  coming  into  conflict  with  what,  from 
the  point  of  view  of  merely  theoretical  capacity,  are 
subordinate  institutions  within  the  State.  Public  opinion 
may  be  backing  up  the  action  of  those  representing  even 
institutions  which  concern  the  general  interest  but  little, 
to  such  an  extent  that  if  Ministers  or  Parliament  were  to 
try  to  meddle  with  these  the  requisite  moral  authority 
would  be  found  wanting. 

What  constitutes  a  nation  has  been  described  by  Renan 
in  these  words.  "  Man,"  he  says,  "  is  enslaved,  neither 
by  his  race,  nor  by  his  religion,  nor  by  the  course  of  rivers, 
nor  by  the  direction  of  mountain  ranges.  A  great  aggre- 
gation of  men,  sane  of  mind  and  warm  of  heart,  creates 
a  moral  consciousness  which  is  called  a  nation."  Such  a 
moral  conseiousness  expresses  the  unity  of  the  citizens  in 
institutions  which  make  up  the  state,  as  do  the  members 
of  an  organism  make  it  up.  The  chief  of  these  institutions, 
that  which  stands  for  the  singleness  of  the  state  to  people 
outside  it,  is  the  Government.  This  may  assume  the 
most  differing  forms.  It  is  Hegel  who  observes  (Rechts- 
philosophie,  paragraphs  273  and  274)  that  every  nation  has 
the  constitution  which  suits  it  and  belongs  to  it.  The 
state,  he  says,  is  the  nation's  spirit  and  depends  on  the 


876  THE   INDIVIDUAL  AND   THE  STATE 

character  of  its  consciousness  of  itself.  It  is  therefore 
idle  to  think  of  giving  to  a  people  a  constitution  a  priori. 
The  principle  of  the  modern  world  as  a  whole  is  freedom 
of  mind,  and  it  is  by  self-development  that  those  aspects 
come  about  which  the  whole  presents.  From  this  stand- 
point it  was  that  he  declared  that  philosophy  refuses  to 
concern  itself  with  "  the  idle  question  as  to  which  form  is 
the  better,  monarchy  or  democracy."  Aristotle  had  given 
in  his  Politics  an  answer  of  a  not  very  different  kind  to 
such  a  question.  But,  whatever  the  constitution,  we 
come  back  in  the  end  to  its  foundation.  This  must  be 
the  consent  of  the  governed.  Even  when  there  is  an 
absolute  monarchy  this  is  so.  The  King  may  claim  to 
rule  as  of  divine  right,  but  unless  the  people  as  a  whole 
recognise  this  right  he  cannot  exercise  it.  It  is  their 
assent  to  his  title  to  be  there,  merely  tacit  and  the  outcome 
of  tradition  though  that  assent  may  be,  that  is  the  ultimate 
foundation  of  his  title.  There  is  of  course  infinite  room 
for  discussion  as  to  why  such  assent  should  be  given.  It 
may  be  said,  as  was  claimed  by  great  French  writers  of 
the  eighteenth  and  early  nineteenth  centuries,  to  be  given 
because  it  is  the  command  of  God,  expressed  through  His 
Church  on  earth,  that  it  should  be  given.  But  even  so, 
the  acceptance  of  this  command  depends  on  the  faith  of 
men  in  the  divinity  of  its  origin.  Such  a  faith  is  only  a 
form  of  general  opinion,  however  important  it  may  be, 
and  so  back  to  its  foundation  on  general  opinion  the  basis 
of  sovereignty  is  always  brought. 

If  this  be  so  it  is  obvious  that  even  within  the  state  the 
controlling  opinion  may  operate  in  different  fashions  and 
forms.  Supreme  legal  capacity  may  be  given  to  Parliament, 
and  yet  Parliament  may  be  restrained  from  exercising  the 
legal  capacity  so  given,  excepting  in  accordance  with  certain 
standards.  Parliament  might,  for  example,  so  far  as  its 
legal  power  is  concerned,  pass  a  law  continuing  its  existence 
far  beyond  the  period  at  which  a  general  election  ought 
to  take  place.  It  might  theoretically  deprive  the  electors 
of  their  power  to  vote  at  elections,  and  so  to  review  its 
conduct  of  public  affairs.  But  if  it  did  it  would  speedily 
be  called  to  account,  somehow.  Civilisation  has  a  good 
many  resources  even  short  of  that  of  "  Pride's  Purge." 
A  statute  of  the  kind  I  am  speaking  of  would  be  within 
the  theoretically  sovereign  power  of  Parliament.  It  might 


THE  STATE  AND  SOVEREIGNTY  NOT  IDENTICAL     377 

be  passed  so  as  to  satisfy  what  are  called,  in  the  stricter 
sense  of  the  term,  the  conventions  of  the  constitution. 
But  constitutional  in  a  larger  meaning  of  the  term  it 
would  not  be.  Parliament  would  find  itself  confronted 
with  a  torrent  from  the  source  of  all  sovereignty  that 
would  overwhelm  it.  So,  too,  were  Parliament  to  pass 
some  Industrial  Act  inflicting  injustice  on  the  working 
classes,  it  might  find  itself  face  to  face  with  the  united 
action  of  the  Trade  Unions,  and  be  reduced  to  impotence 
by  a  general  strike  of  a  magnitude  greater  in  scale  than 
any  so  far  known. 

Thus  there  has  always  to  take  place  a  careful  balancing 
of  considerations,  in  order  to  determine  the  extent  of  the 
mandate  that  has  been  entrusted  to  the  legislature.  For 
that  legislature  does  not  really  represent  sovereign  power. 
Sovereignty  has  its  definite  source,  and  even  the  highest 
institutions  in  the  state  may  not  be  able  to  claim  it.  It  is 
the  assumption  that  the  state  and  sovereignty  are  single 
and  indivisible  that  has  been  the  source  of  confusion,  and 
has  given  rise  to  much  of  the  controversy  between  monists 
and  pluralists.  For  some  purposes  the  state  is  always 
single  and  sovereignty  not  broken  up.  Even  where  there 
is  a  federal  constitution,  and  the  executive  is  by  the  con- 
stitution independent  of  the  legislature,  the  state  is  still 
one  and  indivisible  so  far  as  other  nations  are  concerned. 
It  is  the  state  that  stands  for  what  is  one  and  indivisible 
when  we  have  relations  from  outside  with  the  people  of 
the  United  States  of  America.  Yet  within  that  state 
sovereignty  is  divided  and  can  be  exercised  unitedly  only 
if  there  is  concurrence  of  purpose  on  the  part  of  the 
separate  institutions  which  compose  it.  The  Dominion 
of  Canada  and  the  Commonwealth  of  Australia  illustrate 
the  same  principle  in  other  forms. 

With  ourselves  in  Great  Britain  the  situation  is  theo- 
retically different.  But  it  is  equally  true  that  the  Parlia- 
ment is  powerless  against  opinion.  Even  if  its  members 
had  ceased  to  exercise  a  restraining  influence  upon  the 
government  it  would  always  be  because  the  constituents 
to  whose  wishes  they  have  to  be  responsive  were  not 
sufficiently  in  earnest  to  insist  on  action  by  their  repre- 
sentatives. 

We  can  thus  see  how  sovereignty  means  something  that 
lies  behind  legal  forms  and  institutions,  and  how  it  is 


378  THE   INDIVIDUAL  AND   THE   STATE 

referred  to  a  general  will  of  the  character  defined  for  its 
real  meaning.  That  general  will  may  stand  for  a  choice 
influenced  from  many  sides.  Religion,  industrial  require- 
ment, tradition,  and  other  springs  of  impulse  of  different 
natures,  may  all  enter  into  the  ground  of  the  decision  of 
the  people  at  large.  The  statesman's  task  under  con- 
stitutional or  indeed  any  other  form  of  government  is 
never  an  easy  one.  He  who  acts  in  such  a  position  from 
one  maxim  only  is  a  pedant  who  spoils  things  for  himself 
as  well  as  for  others. 

It  is  because  of  this  complexity  in  the  considerations 
on  which  the  general  will  of  the  people  is  based  that  the 
existence  of  the  state  is  never  the  last  word  in  controversy. 
Much  complaint  has  been  made  against  the  doctrine  that 
the  state  is  itself  subject  to  no  law.  As  a  proposition  of 
technical  jurisprudence  this  doctrine  seems  incontrovertible. 
For  law  as  interpreted  by  the  lawyer  means  a  rule  that 
the  state  lays  down  for  its  own  people  and  enforces.  Such 
a  rule  cannot  be  laid  down  in  the  same  fashion  for  the 
people  of  other  states,  because  the  state  that  enacts  it  is 
unable  to  supply  the  same  sort  of  sanction  as  exists  at 
home.  Its  laws  embody  the  purposes  of  its  own  people, 
not  those  of  others  whom  it  does  not  represent  and  who 
have  given  it  no  authority  to  apply  coercion  among  them. 

If,  however,  we  pass  beyond  the  region  of  jurisprudence 
there  are  other  principles  of  which  we  have  to  take 
account.  Within  a  state  and  apart  from  all  legal  sanction 
there  exist,  as  we  have  seen,  systems  of  morality  and  of 
the  habitual  good  behaviour  which  the  Germans  call 
Sittlichkeit.  These  systems  vary  with  the  standards  of 
different  nations,  but  their  essential  features  are  common. 
All  good  people,  of  whatever  nationality,  recognise 
analogous  obligations  of  truth  and  justice,  and  in  the 
main  they  resemble  in  their  sense  of  what  is  and  what  is 
not  good  form  in  social  life.  In  the  various  great  capitals 
society  presents  only  minor  differences.  Men  and  women 
in  all  of  these  cities  resemble  in  general  purpose  and  in 
habit  more  than  they  differ.  As  in  private  life  so  it  is 
in  affairs  of  state.  It  is  always  possible,  given  mutual 
sympathy  and  forbearance,  to  develop  a  tendency  to  look 
to  an  ideal  which  may  present  itself  as  common  to  different 
nations.  The  desire  for  a  League  of  Nations  is  the  most 
recent  illustration  of  how  this  may  be  attempted  in 


THE  LEAGUE  OF  NATIONS  379 

practice.  The  nascent  League  of  to-day  has  followed 
on  a  period  of  exhaustion  from  fighting.  But  it  is  already 
beyond  much  doubt  that  it  can  be  made  to  grow  into 
strength  if  only  there  be  general  goodwill  towards  it.  In 
the  days  before  the  war  there  had  been  ententes  and 
concerts  between  great  Powers  founded  on  the  same 
sort  of  ideal.  But  the  tendencies  of  the  times  had  allowed 
men's  minds  to  become  too  much  diverted  towards  other 
and  purely  national  objects  to  allow  the  nascent  purpose 
to  be  attained.  That  to  some  extent  at  least  the  purpose 
was  a  practicable  one  was  shown  by  the  successes  that 
had  attended  the  founding  of  certain  limited  ententes 
and  alliances.  The  elimination  of  differences  arising  out 
of  territorial  and  commercial  ambitions  had  led  to  real 
friendships,  with  the  disappearance  of  old  rivalries. 
Nations  had  begun  to  see  that  they  had  duties  towards 
each  of  the  others  in  the  same  group,  as  well  as  rights.  A 
new  kind  of  international  Sittlichkeit,  based  on  more  than 
the  letter  of  any  agreement,  was  developing  itself. 

But  the  effort  to  make  all  the  great  nations,  and  not 
merely  those  in  the  respective  groups,  accept  this  attitude 
ex  animo,  failed.  There  was  not  enough  of  sustaining 
faith  behind  the  movement.  The  desire  for  a  League  of 
Nations  which  may  supersede  the  old  grouping,  with  its 
attendant  dangers  in  encouraging  attempts  to  balance 
power,  is  probably  more  real  to-day  than  it  has  been  at 
any  previous  period  in  the  history  of  the  world.  It  is 
not  yet  strong  or  pervasive  enough  to  produce  the  sense 
of  certainty  as  to  its  prospects.  Still,  the  desire  is  there, 
and  bears  witness  to  its  real  foundation. 

The  state  is  no  final  form  for  the  embodiment  of  the 
purposes  of  a  people.  The  world  is  becoming  more  and 
more  international.  States  are  not  isolated  units.  They 
continue  to  subsist  only  through  relations  with  other 
states,  relations  which  tend  to  multiply  in  volume  as 
well  as  intensity,  and  which  show  no  prospect  of  being 
superseded.  As  this  is  so  it  is  natural  that  the  purposes 
of  the  people  of  each  nation  should  broaden  progressively. 
There  may  be  quarrels  and  wars  in  the  future.  Luxury, 
ignorance,  and  indifference  always  promote  misinterpre- 
tations, and  these  are  not  easy  to  prevent  from  arising. 
But  just  as  the  mind  of  man  extends  to  ends  beyond  his 
own  private  concerns,  and  beyond  those  of  his  family,  or 


880  THE   INDIVIDUAL  AND   THE   STATE 

of  his  city,  so  he  has  latent  in  his  consciousness  ends  which 
carry  him  beyond  the  state  to  which  he  belongs.  For 
the  vital  interests  of  that  state  he  may  be  ready  to  fight 
and  die,  and  nevertheless  he  may  not  be  of  those  who 
pronounce  on  the  side  of  their  country  whether  in  the 
right  or  in  the  wrong.  The  sense  of  what  is  seemly,  and 
beyond  this,  conscience,  with  its  insistence  on  the  obliga- 
tion to  speak  the  truth  and  to  be  just,  may  bring  the 
purposes  of  the  citizen  in  his  public  life  into  sharp  conflict 
with  those  of  the  man  who  looks  only  to  the  expediency 
that  is  of  momentary  importance  and  duration. 

In  short,  there  are  levels  in  human  purposes  in  which 
they  rise  above  the  state  as  a  final  form  of  end.  Beauty 
and  goodness  and  truth  concern  men  neither  merely  as 
individuals  nor  as  citizens.  There  is  an  outlook  that  is 
cosmopolitan  because  no  other  end  than  that  of  humanity 
simply  as  such  can  satisfy  it.  When  our  concerns  are 
those  of  mankind  in  this  higher  sense  we  are  still  at  a 
level  which  is  that  of  the  finite,  but  we  recognise  that  our 
finiteness  is  pointing  beyond  itself,  and  that  within  unduly 
limited  forms  of  self-expression  mind  is  not  to  be  confined. 

The  outlook  at  this  level  and  the  higher  ends  that 
direct  it  have,  like  those  of  lower  degrees,  embodiments 
which  constitute  their  objective  world.  These  embodi- 
ments have  nothing  approaching  the  definiteness  which 
those  within  a  state  display.  But  they  appear  and  have 
their  witnesses  in  treaties,  in  diplomatic  usages,  in  con- 
ventions about  rules  of  international  law,  and  in  the 
movements  for  putting  the  mutual  guarantees  of  inter- 
national peace  on  a  secure  footing,  and  the  agreements 
in  which  these  are  expressed.  The  stability  of  these 
objective  embodiments  of  international  purpose  may  not 
so  far  have  been  great.  We  may  be  still  a  long  way 
off  from  such  a  basis  of  enduring  Sittlichkeit  among 
nations  as  will  afford  stability  for  the  rules  of  what  is 
called  international  law.  The  disregard  of  these  rules 
through  the  great  war  illustrates  this.  But  at  least  there 
are  already  some  indications  that  higher  than  merely 
national  purposes  are  moving  mankind,  and  that  it  is 
struggling  to  express  them  in  institutions  that  may  in 
the  end  prove  to  have  dominating  influence. 

There  is  thus,  as  indeed  there  always  has  been,  reality 
of  a  nature  outside  and  beyond  that  of  the  state.  How- 


WHAT   IS  HIGHER  THAN  THE  STATE         381 

ever  shadowy  it  is  there,  and  it  shows  itself  to  be  at  least 
capable  of  development  into  stable  forms.  This  is  only 
what  was  to  be  expected.  For  the  source  of  this  reality 
is  the  same  as  the  source  of  that  of  the  state  itself.  Both 
are  due  to  the  character  of  mind,  which  works  and  creates 
general  opinion  at  levels  that  transcend  the  ends,  not  only 
of  the  particular  self,  but  of  the  mere  citizen  of  any  par- 
ticular nation.  In  ethics,  in  the  recognition  of  each 
other  of  whatever  race  as  human  and  as  therefore 
entitled  to  respect  as  persons,  in  religion,  in  art,  and  in 
knowledge,  local  particularity  counts  for  little.  It  is 
superseded  at  the  higher  degrees  in  experience  at  which 
the  mind  is  discovering  itself  in  the  greatest  aspects  of  its 
nature  and  activity.  For  the  mind  is,  as  has  been  pre- 
viously insisted  on,  inadequately  described  as  a  thing 
among  things.  It  is  what  can  be  adequately  spoken  of 
only  in  terms  that  belong  to  its  own  character.  It  is  that 
within  which  all  that  is  particular  as  well  as  all  that  is 
universal  fall,  and  is  that  which  by  its  overreaching  intel- 
lectual activity  establishes  distinctions  between  true 
and  false  and  real  and  unreal,  that  have  meaning  and 
validity  only  for  itself.  It  is  what  exists  at  no  single 
degree  or  level  either  in  actuality  or  in  knowledge.  It  is 
the  dynamic  principle  to  which  is  referred  back  all  that 
falls  within  experience,  and  not  only  all  that  falls  within 
it  but  all  that  gives  it  significance. 


26 


PART    V 
THE   HUMAN   AND   THE   DIVINE 


383 


CHAPTER    XVIII 

THE   RELATION   OF   MAN  TO   GOD 

To  the  question  of  how  the  individual  is  related  to  the 
state,  we  have  now  found  the  answer  to  be  that  the  state 
embodies  in  external  form  certain  common  purposes  of 
the  individual  citizens  who  compose  it.  It  is  the  various 
characters  which  common  social  ends  assume,  and  the 
general  standpoints  of  the  citizens  whose  ends  they  are, 
that  determine  the  nature  and  distribution  of  the  various 
public  institutions  within  the  state  and  their  relations  to 
it,  as  well  as  the  character,  extent,  and  distribution  of  the 
authority  of  the  state  itself.  We  discussed  the  meaning 
of  what  is  called  the  general  will  and  found  it  to  lie  in  a 
correspondence  based  on  identities  in  the  minds  of  indi- 
viduals with  common  social  ends.  If  it  were  once  clearly 
recognised  that  minds  were  not  entities  wholly  exclusive 
of  each  other,  it  seemed  that  there  was  little  difficulty  in 
the  acceptance  of  the  conclusion  that  sovereignty  could 
be  referred  to  community  of  purpose  in  the  citizens  who 
compose  the  Commonwealth. 

We  have  now  to  pass  to  a  more  obscure  question,  that 
of  the  relation  of  man  to  God.  It  is  well  to  begin  by 
endeavouring  to  clear  the  ground  of  familiar  preliminary 
difficulties,  and  this  appears  to  be  possible  only  if  a  resolute 
application  is  made  of  the  principle  of  degrees.  So  far 
we  have  seen  a  good  many  perplexities  disappear  as  the 
realisation  of  the  relativity  of  knowledge  became  plain. 
That  is  how  the  physicists  have  got  over  the  trouble 
of  the  apparently  inconsistent  results  of  measurement  in 
time  and  space ;  the  biologists  over  the  obtrusion 
of  mechanistic  obsessions ;  the  psychologists  over  the 
demands  for  recognition  of  a  physiological  basis  for 
mind  ;  and  the  poets  over  the  stern  call  to  realities  by 
science.  In  each  case  the  demand  made  has  been  answered 
by  its  being  shown  that  the  conceptions  on  which  those 
who  made  these  demands  based  them  were  conceptions 

385 


386  THE   RELATION   OF  MAN   TO   GOD 

of  only  limited  application,  an  application  conditioned  by 
the  level  in  thought  and  the  interpretation  of  experience 
by  which  the  character  of  the  demand  was  determined. 
The  meaning  of  reality  proved  to  be  by  no  means  always 
of  the  same  kind.  For  it  varied  with  differences  between 
orders  which  were  distinct  for  reflection  when  carried  far 
enough,  and  which  resulted  in  forms  of  truth  that  can 
be  expressed  in  no  terms  beyond  those  that  are  appropriate 
to  their  special  order. 

What,  then,  is  the  nature  of  the  conception  which  we 
seek  to  frame  in  our  minds  when  we  speak  of  God  ? 
Obviously  one  belonging  to  a  very  comprehensive  order, 
for  it  is  in  the  light  of  no  limited  standpoint  that  we 
can  set  ourselves  to  explain  downwards,  looking  for 
nothing  above  or  beyond.  We  cannot  mean  by  God  a 
thing  or  a  substance.  For  this  would  give  us  only  what 
was  an  object  to  the  mind  and  possibly  external  to  it, 
as  the  old  Deists  held.  Now  Deism  never  succeeded  in 
giving  us  any  notion  of  God  other  than  that  of  a  finite 
person  acting  ab  extra.  It  seems  plain  that  God  must 
be  other  than  this.  He  can  hardly,  however,  to  go  to  the 
opposite  extreme,  be  wholly  transcendent,  that  is  to  say 
unreachable  in  knowledge.  For  that  would  be  to  leave 
Him  as  really  confronting  the  subject,  if  not  as  an  abstract 
notion  yet  as  a  mere  inference,  or  alternatively  as 
a  bare  awareness  in  feeling,  as  mysticism  will  have  it. 
He  would  none  the  less  in  both  cases  be  finite  as  being 
in  truth  outside  of  mind,  in  that  He  was  thus  tran- 
scendent. To  call  Him  the  Absolute  appears  to  be  not 
less  objectionable,  though  on  yet  other  grounds.  To 
begin  with,  we  do  not  know  how  this  word  is  to  be 
interpreted.  We  have  no  phase  in  experience  that  corre- 
sponds to  it.  Even  in  the  highest  efforts  of  poetry  speech 
about  it  seems  only  to  be  possible  when  it  takes  refuge 
in  spatial  and  temporal  metaphor.  Poetry  may  through 
such  metaphor  suggest  truth,  but  adequate  truth  it  cannot 
utter.  It  leaves  us  confronted  with  a  result  beyond, 
which  we  cannot  express  in  words.  For  the  emotion 
awakened  is  scientifically  valuable  only  by  its  implications 
for  reflection,  and  the  implications  cannot  be  rendered 
definite.  They  point  vaguely  towards  a  God  who  is  a 
timeless  totum  simul,  a  conception  for  which  the  only 
kind  of  knowledge  we  possess  and  that  has  any  meaning 


GOD   NO   EMPTY  ABSOLUTE  387 

for  us  has  no  use.  For  the  concepts  of  all  our  knowledge 
have  reference  to  an  actual  that  is  not  static  but  dynamic 
and  present  in  us,  and  so  in  some  relation  to  time.  To 
speak  of  God  as  the  Absolute  is,  however,  of  value  as 
indicating  negatively  what  He  cannot  be,  if  not  as  telling 
what  He  is.  It  implies  truly  that  His  existence  belongs 
to  no  partial  or  single  level  in  reality.  Substance  He 
therefore  is  not,  nor  yet  subject  as  differentiated  from 
its  object.  He  must  not  stand  for  less  than  the  entirety, 
and  such  an  entirety  must  be  that  within  which  all  dis- 
tinctions and  resulting  relations  can  fall.  It  cannot  be 
adequately  expressed  as  a  mind,  for  this  suggests  that  it 
may  stand  excluded  from  entities  other  than  itself. 

By  this  negative  procedure  we  are  driven  back  to  look 
for  our  idea  of  God  as  to  be  sought  in  the  nature  of  know- 
ledge as  it  has  already  presented  itself.  We  saw  that  the 
principle  of  degrees  implies  the  view  that  knowledge  is 
foundational  in  the  sense  of  being  all-comprehending, 
the  first  as  well  as  the  last  within  mind  itself.  It  must 
therefore  be  that  in  which  exists  self -developed  the  entire 
hierarchy  of  degrees,  within  mind  and  within  the  reality 
which  has  no  existence  apart  from  it.  We  also  saw  that 
not  only  has  the  universe  no  meaning  apart  from  such 
foundational  mind,  but  that  even  the  distinction  between 
subject  and  object  is  mind's  own  creation  and  falls  within 
it.  Such  a  reduction  of  objectivity  to  creation  through 
concepts  and  their  resulting  mental  standpoints  did  not 
surprise  us.  For  the  principle  of  quantitative  relativity, 
as  shown  to  be  creative  of  shape  and  measurement,  by 
the  physicists  of  our  own  day,  had  prepared  us  for  the 
extension  of  that  principle  to  qualitative  differences  arising 
from  variation  in  dominant  conception,  and  for  so  finding 
the  work  of  mind  to  be  present  in  every  phase  of  reality. 

We  may  thus  speak  of  such  foundational  knowledge  as 
the  absolute  of  which  we  are  in  search,  if  we  do  not  leave 
out  of  memory  that  what  we  are  so  speaking  of  is  no 
absolute  that  is  existent  apart  from  mind  as  it  is  disclosed 
in  ourselves.  We  are  assisted,  if  we  so  speak,  by  what 
has  already  been  pointed  out,  that  the  plurality  of  minds 
is  a  plurality  that  has  meaning  only  at  certain  levels  in 
reflection  that  are  subordinate  in  that  they  import  organic 
conditions,  such  that  mind  expresses  itself  in  the  forms 
of  living  beings  with  physical  aspects.  When  we  got 


888  THE  RELATION  OF  MAN  TO   GOD 

to  the  stage  in  knowledge  at  which  such  apparently 
mutually  exclusive  beings  come  into  the  relations  that 
their  intercourse  with  one  another  requires,  we  saw  how 
this  was  only  possible  by  reason  of  a  correspondence  based 
on  genuine  identity  of  thought,  an  identity  which  belonged 
to  a  level  different  from  that  of  the  externality  to  each 
other  of  events.  We  are  therefore  directed  in  our  inquiry 
towards  mind,  not  as  activity  in  space  and  time,  but  as 
that  for  and  through  which  spatial  and  temporal  relation- 
ships arise.  It  is  no  totum  simul  existing  independently 
of  these  relations.  It  gives  them  place  within  its  entirety 
along  with  other  aspects  of  reality.  Thus  it  is  only  as 
presupposing  mind  that  these  aspects  can  themselves  be 
explicable.  That  is  an  implication  of  the  principle  of 
relativity  in  its  comprehensive  form.  Of  course  we  start 
from  our  finite  human  knowledge,  conditioned  as  it  is  by 
nature.  For  the  physicist,  for  the  chemist,  for  the 
physiologist,  for  the  psychologist,  the  "  That  "  and  the 
"  It  "  imply  just  man  as  they  find  him  in  nature.  But 
not  only  do  these  standpoints  yield  results  that  differ 
fundamentally  in  logical  conception,  but  they  give  rise  to 
aspects  which  consist,  and  yet  are  all,  in  their  own  ways, 
equally  true.  Human  personality  and  the  human  mind 
are  thus  complex  in  the  orders  of  thought  they  import. 
More  points  of  view  than  one  are  required  if  man  is  to  be 
understood.  The  respective  conceptions  of  the  sciences 
just  referred  to  are  not  only  merely  relatively  true.  They 
are  a  long  way  from  being  the  only  conceptions  required 
for  our  interpretation.  We  are  more  than  they  make  us 
out  to  be.  Not  only  in  art  and  in  religion,  but  in  philo- 
sophy also  this  becomes  fairly  plain  in  the  light  which  is 
cast  on  the  character  of  reality  by  the  study  of  the  all- 
embracing  scope  of  mind. 

Can  we  hope  to  work  out  the  conception  of  the  ultimate 
character  of  knowledge  adequately  ?  The  question  needs 
consideration.  On  the  one  hand,  we  are  finite  human 
beings,  finite  in  this,  that  our  thinking  is  conditioned  by 
the  organisation  of  the  brain,  a  brain  through  which  mind 
as  it  is  in  us  expresses  itself.  On  the  other  hand,  this  brain 
is  not  only  physically  active  but  lives  and  also  thinks. 
It  belongs,  in  the  higher  degree  of  reality  which  it  presents, 
to  the  level  of  personality.  So  far  as  it  belongs  to  this 
level  its  activity  is  that  of  a  self,  which  is  more  than  at 


GOD   AS   IMMANENT  389 

first  sight  it  appears,  for  it  turns  out  that  thought  even 
when  thus  conditioned  is  not  the  less  the  knowledge  which 
has  given  rise  to  its  own  problems,  and  is  limited  in  their 
solution  only  by  physical  difficulty  in  the  wielding  of 
what  is  potentially  a  limitless  power  over  a  limitless  range. 
Of  course  that  capacity  is  hampered  by  these  physical 
conditions,  but  they  are  conditions  which,  if  they  confine 
reflection  to  feebleness  in  its  procedure,  do  not  affect  its 
intrinsic  character.  None  the  less  there  are  efforts  which 
the  human  mind  is  as  unable  to  make  successfully  as  it  is 
to  visualise  the  contents  of  a  tensor  equation. 

For  all  these  reasons  it  appears  to  be  as  immanent 
that  we  must  seek  God.  The  physicists  are  to-day  search- 
ing for  the  foundations  of  the  phenomenal  world  of  space 
and  time  in  the  work  of  reflection.  As  Professor  Eddington 
observes,  in  the  article  which  I  have  already  quoted,  the 
intervention  of  mind  in  the  laws  of  nature  is  more  far- 
reaching  than  is  usually  supposed.  That  is  a  saying 
which  requires  interpretation,  but  in  it  there  is  profound 
truth.  In  the  same  sense  not  less  far-reaching  is  the 
intervention  of  mind  in  the  laws  which  apply  to  the  other 
phases  of  the  universe.  And  this  is  so  because  at  every 
turn  the  operation  of  the  principle  of  relativity  is  as 
transforming  in  its  application  as  it  is  where  it  guides  us 
in  our  thinking  about  space.  God  can  hardly  be  less  than 
the  process  of  mind  in  an  ideal  integrity,  the  process  in 
which  mind  as  all-comprehending  is  ever  realising  itself 
at  a  series  of  degrees  which  are  divergent  logically  in  so 
far  as  they  are  different  in  the  dominating  conceptions 
which  lie  at  their  respective  foundations.  To  conceive 
God  otherwise  would  be  to  conceive  Him  as  really  a  finite 
God.  Because  the  differences  referred  to  are  in  level  of 
knowledge,  including  self-knowledge,  it  does  not  follow 
that  man's  knowledge  is  indistinguishable  from  God's 
knowledge.  They  are  not  two  separate  entities,  nor  need 
they  be  so  for  the  differentiation  of  finiteness  from  infinity. 
Even  in  the  mind  that  is  finite  there  may  be  degrees  that 
take  us  beyond  what  is  finite,  intelligible  to  abstract 
thought  indeed,  but  incapable  of  becoming  present  in 
direct  sense  experience.  For  that  experience  is  the 
experience  of  a  mind  of  physically  limited  capacity,  and 
is  therefore,  so  far  as  the  senses  are  concerned,  limited 
in  range.  In  mind  that  is  not  thus  trammelled  by  the 


390  THE   RELATION   OF   MAN   TO   GOD 

restrictions  of  a  particular  organ,  but  can  present  itself  to 
itself  in  its  completeness,  with  all  the  distinctions  and 
degrees  that  it  establishes  as  belonging  to  the  entirety, 
present  and  yet  with  their  separateness  superseded,  there  can 
be  no  such  limitations  as  characterise  human  experience. 
Time  and  space  will  not  disappear,  for  their  forms  result 
from  its  own  operation.  But  at  a  higher  degree  in  reality 
they  cannot  present  themselves  as  limiting  conditions,  for 
their  source  in  mind  itself  cannot  be  obscure  to  a  perfect 
comprehension.  There  is  no  phase  that  mind,  as  it  must 
be  interpreted  in  its  perfection,  does  not  overreach  and 
hold  within  itself. 

It  is  therefore  to  within  our  human  experience,  inter- 
preted as  implying  higher  degrees,  that  we  must  look  for 
the  eternal  self  that  is  all-embracing.  We  are  not  to  seek 
an  Absolute  Being  apart  that  cannot  be  reached  by  know- 
ledge such  as  ours.  We  are  to  look  on  our  minds  as  our 
means  of  access  and,  by  studying  the  character  of  the 
levels  to  which  reflection  points  us,  to  observe  what  direc- 
tion they  indicate  to  our  reflection.  It  is  to  the  self  as 
we  have  experience  of  it  in  human  life  that  we  have  to 
turn  for  our  starting-point,  and  to  nothing  that  has  not 
an  analogue  in  the  characteristics  of  that  self.  We  have 
to  remember  that  our  very  experience  teaches  that  the 
only  explanation  which  satisfies  in  the  end  is  explanation 
from  above  downwards,  finding  in  the  conceptions  that 
belong  to  lower  levels  distinguishing  characteristics  that 
disclose  themselves  as  the  outcome  of  what  is  higher  and 
more  perfect  in  knowledge.  What  is  perfect  is  most 
concrete  and  also  most  actual,  for  it  is  only  by  abstractions 
made  within  it  that  what  is  lower  in  the  scale  of  thought 
emerges.  It  is  no  question  of  genesis  in  time.  The 
genesis  is  due  to  thought,  to  the  activity  of  mind.  To 
say  merely  that  things  are,  is  to  tell  very  little  about 
them.  For  just  as  much  from  another  point  of  view  they 
are  not,  and  it  is  only  when  the  affirmative  is  bound  up 
with  the  negative,  as  in  change,  that  we  approach  what 
is  actual.  But  even  with  this  we  cannot  stand  still,  for 
reflection,  which  is  always  passing  beyond  its  objects, 
crystallises  the  process,  momentarily  at  all  events,  in  what 
is  grasped  as  fixed  by  its  limitation  through  something 
different  from  itself  and  in  that  sense  external  to  it.  So 
we  generalise  to  the  conception  of  a  quantity  of  such 


DIFFICULTIES   OF  THE  HEGELIAN  ATTEMPT    391 

things,  and  in  distinguishing  them  from  each  other  we 
are  driven  to  think  of  them  as  having  individual  qualities 
of  their  own.  We  are  driven  so  in  our  reflection  to  their 
measure,  to  their  grounds  in  existence,  to  their  contrast 
with  the  observing  mind,  and  to  limitless  other  relations 
which  enter  into  their  nature,  relations  which  are  not 
arithmetically  finite  in  number  because  mind  is  unlimited 
in  its  activity.  Such  relations  disclose  themselves  as 
entering  into  the  very  foundation  and  meaning  of  our 
diverse  experiences.  They  appear  together  in  aspects  of 
their  presentation.  Because  they  are  forms  of  an  infinite 
and  omnipresent  activity,  the  whole  of  which  is  there  in 
every  phase,  it  is  only  in  the  abstractions  made  by  reflection 
that  we  isolate  them  with  the  consequences  to  which  they 
give  rise.  Whether  a  catalogue  can  be  made  of  these 
categories,  or  whether  they  can  be  presented  as  a  complete 
system,  may  well  be  doubtful.  For  mind  is  protean  in 
the  forms  of  its  activity,  which  know  no  boundaries  in 
range  or  number.  The  most  guarded  attempt  to  make 
such  a  catalogue  or  presentation  is  apt  to  suggest  that 
there  is  some  sort  of  absolute  system  capable  of  being 
taken  in  detachment,  a  view  that  becomes  full  of  difficulty 
on  scrutiny.  It  is  the  sense  of  such  difficulty  that  has 
led  to  the  disposition  to  reject  the  Hegelian  system,  on 
the  part  even  of  some  who  have  attached  high  importance 
to  Hegel's  method  of  approaching  the  problem  of  reality. 
For  practical  purposes  it  does  not  appear  necessary  to 
make  such  an  attempt  to  set  up  an  absolute  system  as  he 
thought  he  could  make.  It  is  sufficient  if  we  have  a  firm 
grasp  of  that  higher  character  of  the  self  which  directs 
us  beyond  our  own  finite  forms,  and  which  is  indicated 
not  merely  in  metaphysics,  but  in  art  and  in  religion.  For 
these  last,  although,  as  I  have  already  said,  they  cannot 
give  us  actual  knowledge  as  the  foundation  of  faith  in 
aspects  unseen,  yet  testify  to  their  presence  as  ideally 
implied  in  a  universe  that  we  know  to  be  at  least  far  more 
than  merely  mechanistic. 

It  is  important  to  have  the  significance  of  this  testimony 
before  our  minds.  The  principle  applies,  not  only  to 
works  of  art  in  the  ordinary  sense,  but  to  the  highest 
forms  of  reflective  poetry,  as  well  as  to  the  language  of, 
for  example,  the  Bible.  Goethe,  whose  insight  into  the 
necessity  of  recognising  underlying  foundations  was  pene- 


392  THE   RELATION   OF   MAN   TO   GOD 

trating,  has  illustrated  his  own  point  of  view  in  a  great 
deal  of  his  poetry.  One  sample  I  will  quote  presently.  It 
is  a  poem  on  the  nature  of  God,  and  is  among  the  firmest 
of  his  utterances  on  this  subject. 

Art  produces  for  us  a  different  world  from  that  of  actual 
nature,  a  world  with  a  reality  of  a  different  kind.  This 
reality  may  be,  perhaps  it  always  is,  "  born  again  of  the 
spirit."  As  Goethe  says :  "  Die  hochste  Wirkung  des 
Geistes  ist  den  Geist  hervorzurufen."  And  elsewhere,1 
"  Nature  organises  a  living,  an  indifferent  being,  the  artist 
something  dead,  but  full  of  significance  ;  nature  something 
real,  the  artist  something  apparent.  Into  the  works  of 
nature  the  spectator  must  import  significance,  thought, 
effect,  reality  ;  in  a  work  of  art  he  will  and  must  find 
this  already  there.  A  perfect  imitation  of  nature  is  in  no 
sense  possible  ;  the  artist  is  only  called  to  the  represen- 
tation of  the  surface  of  an  appearance.  The  outside  of 
the  vessel,  the  living  whole  that  speaks  to  all  our  faculties 
of  mind  and  sense,  that  stirs  our  desire,  elevates  our 
intelligence — that  whose  possession  makes  us  happy,  the 
vivid,  potent,  finished  Beautiful,  for  all  this  is  the  artist 
appointed." 

Goethe,  in  this  last  passage,  is  distinguishing  the  relative 
reality  of  nature,  as  confronting  us  "  indifferent  "  to  mind, 
with  the  work  of  art  as  being  at  another  level  in  the 
hierarchy  of  reality,  a  level  at  which  the  mind  of  the  artist 
is  actually  embodied  in  his  work.  Goethe  was  not  what  is 
ordinarily  understood  by  a  metaphysician,  but  he  possessed 
great  philosophical  insight. 

In  the  Proosmion  to  his  Gott  und  Welt  he  expresses  himself 
thus  : 

"  Im  Namen  dessen  der  Sich  selbst  erschuf  ! 
Von  Ewigkeit  in  schaffendem  Beruf ; 
In  Seinem  Namen  der  den  Glauben  schafft, 
Vertrauen,  Liebe,  Thatigkeit  und  Kraft ; 
In  Jenes  Namen,  der,  so  oft  genannt, 
Dem  Wesen  nach  blieb  immer  unbekannt : 

Was  war'  ein  Gott,  der  nur  von  aussen  stiesse, 
Im  Kreis  das  All  am  Finger  laufen  liesse  ! 
Ihm  ziemts,  die  Welt  im  Innern  zu  bewegen, 
Natur  in  Sich,  Sich  in  Natur  zu  hegen, 
So  dass,  was  in  Ihm  lebt  und  webt  und  ist, 
Nie  Seine  Kraft,  nie  Seinen  Geist  vermisst. 

1  In  his  commentary  in  Diderot's  Versuch  uber  die  Malerei. 


RELIGION  393 

**  Im  Innern  1st  ein  Universum  auch  : 
Daher  der  Volker  loblicher  Gebrauch 
Das  jeglicher  das  Beste  was  er  kennt, 
Er  Gott,  ja  seinen  Gott  benennt, 
Ihm  Himmel  und  Erden  iibergiebt, 
Ihn  fiirchtet,  und  wo  moglich  liebt." 

In  the  Gospel  of  John  we  find  what  is  in  reality  the 
same  thought.  At  Jacob's  well  Jesus  taught  the  higher 
truth  to  the  woman  of  Samaria.  Guessing  that  He  was  a 
Jew,  she  assumed  that  He  would  say  that  Jerusalem,  and 
not  the  mountain  of  Samaria,  was  the  place  where  people 
ought  to  worship.  But  Jesus  told  her  that  she  worshipped 
she  knew  not  what,  but  that  the  hour  would  come  when 
true  worshippers  would  worship  the  Father  in  Spirit  and 
in  Truth.  "  God  is  a  Spirit,"  He  said  to  her,  "  and  they 
who  worship  him  must  worship  him  in  spirit  and  in 
truth." 

In  religion,  expressed  in  language  such  as  this,  we  have 
a  certain  completion  suggested  for  our  human  experience 
without  which  it  would  be  one-sided  and  essentially 
defective.  Reality  is  brought  before  us  in  a  further  aspect, 
an  aspect  which  is  offered  to  us  as  possible  through  the 
acceptance  of  a  higher  standpoint,  to  be  attained,  it  may  be, 
not  reflectively,  but  by  a  voluntary  submission  of  the  will. 
To  this  we  feel  ourselves  moved  emotionally,  rather  than 
as  the  result  of  any  process  of  logical  reasoning.  It  is  by 
what  may  be  called  constant  practice  in  some  form  of  the 
presence  of  what  is  highest  in  purpose  and  in  level,  that 
we  seem  best  able  to  keep  this  emotion  alive,  and  our 
experience  of  life  appears  to  require  such  practice  in  some 
form  if  it  is  to  obtain  for  itself  the  fullest  fruition. 

The  self  is  personal.  But  it  is  more  in  its  implication 
than  merely  finite.  It  is  misleading,  therefore,  to  frame 
images  of  the  self  in  its  highest  conceivable  and  most 
comprehensive  character  as  what  we  call  a  person. 
Finiteness  and  even  thinghood  are  at  once  suggested  by 
the  implications  of  the  human  order  to  which  personality 
as  we  are  familiar  with  it  belongs,  and  in  what  is  neces- 
sarily a  rarefied  atmosphere  we  cannot  genuinely  advance 
if  propped  only  by  metaphors  that  are  unsustaining  and 
may  fail  us  at  any  turn.  The  self  nevertheless  exists  in  all 
its  possible  forms  at  a  degree  that  implies  personality.  The 
Highest  Selfhood,  the  selfhood  which  is  the  foundation  not 
only  of  the  individual  subject  but  of  the  entirety  of  the 


894  THE   RELATION  OF  MAN  TO  GOD 

universe,  must  therefore  be  at  least  personal.  But  as  it 
must  be  taken  to  include  as  falling  within  its  own  activity 
the  distinction  of  self  from  not-self  that  is  characteristic  of 
human  finitude,  and  to  preserve  this  distinction  yet  only  as 
its  own  act  and  determination,  so  it  must,  if  an  imperfect 
expression  may  be  used,  be,  not  merely  personal,  but 
super-personal,  in  virtue  of  its  reality  as  extending  beyond 
the  limitations  of  the  finite.  For  all  such  limitations  fall 
within  itself  and  at  the  most  are  there  only  for  it  as  its 
own  production.  Personality,  as  we  have  seen,  implies 
finitude,  if  there  is  to  be  differentiation  between  persons. 
But  even  our  human  experience  of  our  relations  to  others, 
and  the  very  social  surroundings  which  the  mind  requires 
for  its  development,  carry  us  beyond  such  mere  finitude  to 
a  standpoint  in  which  correspondence  in  thought  importing 
identity  is  presupposed  in  the  recognition  of  ourselves  in 
association  with  our  neighbours.  At  this  standpoint 
personality  lifts  us  to  a  level  in  reflective  self-consciousness 
higher  than  that  of  a  selfhood  that  is  exclusive.  Not 
merely  I  and  you,  but  neither  merely  you  nor  me,  form 
the  ground  of  social  intercourse  and  of  citizenship.  In 
art,  in  religion,  and  in  knowledge  itself,  this  more  than 
personal  standpoint  emerges  yet  more  distinctly,  and  we 
are  reminded  that  all  atomic  views  of  human  existence  fall 
short  of  finality. 

There  is  thus  a  natural  impulse  in  experience  which 
directs  the  mind  to  a  fuller  view  of  itself  than  as  a  merely 
living  and  intelligent  organism  occupying  a  definite  and 
particular  station  in  the  world  of  space  and  time.  The 
larger  outlook  is  that  in  which  the  consciousness  of  our  own 
relativity,  as  well  as  the  relativity  of  our  knowledge,  becomes 
the  dominant  one.  Just  as  space  and  time  are  found  to  be 
dependent  for  their  reality  on  outlook,  so  do  other  aspects 
of  the  real  turn  out  to  be  equally  dependent.  We  visualise 
only  from  standpoints  which  emerge  on  scrutiny  as  being 
neither  final  nor  even  adequate  to  the  possibilities  that 
confront  us.  The  conceptions  which  are  appropriate 
solely  to  isolated  standpoints  dominate  not  only  our 
thinking  but  our  volition.  But  we  learn  progressively  that 
it  is  not  in  exclusive  forms  of  contemplation  and  action 
that  we  can  attain  to  that  of  which  we  are  in  search.  As 
higher  standpoints  are  reached  our  vision  becomes  wider, 
and  the  object-world,  the  relativity  of  which  begins  to  be 


THOUGHT  AS  CREATIVE  895 

realised,  becomes  less  foreign.  Reflection  and  action  come 
to  seem  less  and  less  separated.  As  the  object- world 
ceases  to  seem  external  and  strange  to  the  subject,  con- 
ception and  execution  appear  as  in  their  ultimate  forms 
inseparable.  For  mind  that  knows  the  distinction  between 
its  object  and  itself  as  one  due  only  to  finitude  in  know- 
ledge, to  conceive  and  to  create  are  no  longer  mutually 
exclusive  ideas. 

One  of  the  hindrances  in  preventing  such  an  idea  from 
appearing  adequate  to  the  facts  is  our  notion  of  time  as 
independent  and  self-subsisting.  Purpose  and  the  action 
it  directs  seem  to  us  to  be  necessarily  separate  in  it.  For 
mind  which  is  limited  through  its  activity  having  to 
express  itself  under  physical  conditions  this  may  well  for 
some  purposes  be  so.  But,  as  the  physicists  themselves 
have  taught  us,  time  is  not  what  Newton  took  it  to  be, 
something  existing  absolutely  and  independent  of  mind. 
The  doctrine  of  relativity  has  shown  us  that  time,  at  least 
as  we  experience  it,  may  be  in  its  forms  merely  appearance, 
not  in  the  sense  that  there  is  a  real  time  relatively  to  which 
it  is  only  appearance,  but  in  the  quite  different  sense  that 
its  relativity  is  of  the  essence  of  its  reality,  and  that  it 
owes  that  reality,  notwithstanding  the  absolute  form 
which  we  erroneously  attribute  to  it,  to  the  constructive 
interpretation  of  intelligence.  The  character  of  the  time 
relation  varies,  even  for  physical  science,  with  the  stand- 
point of  the  observer.  Its  apparent  fixity  is  the  creation 
of  abstraction.  At  certain  standpoints  we  accept  it  as 
fixed  and  final  in  its  appearances.  At  other  standpoints 
we  do  not.  Therefore  for  mind,  when  aware  of  itself  in 
its  completeness  and  of  the  relativity  to  itself  of  the  entire 
universe  that  falls  within  it,  succession  in  time  is  indeed 
a  form  of  which  it  takes  account,  but  takes  account  only 
as  determined  by  standpoints  that  are  not  final.  It  is  not 
either  by  adding  its  various  outlooks  together  or  by  blotting 
them  out  that  knowledge  becomes  complete.  It  is  by 
rising  to  a  level  above  them  in  comprehension,  and  so 
superseding  while  preserving  and  not  destroying,  that  even 
in  daily  life  knowledge  develops  itself.  Who  has  not 
noted  the  effect  of  fuller  study  in  enabling  him  to  grasp 
details  as  a  system  ?  Whether  it  be  in  the  reading  of  a 
book,  or  in  the  painting  of  a  picture,  or  in  the  appreciation 
of  a  poem,  what  we  find  we  need  is  to  become  so  familiar 


396  THE  RELATION   OF  MAN  TO   GOD 

with  the  details  that  we  can  combine  them  in  a  whole  and 
interpret  them  in  a  system.  It  is  not  by  what  logicians 
call  "  linear  "  inference  that  knowledge  is  in  the  main 
extended.  It  is  by  ascertaining  the  reciprocal  implica- 
tions of  an  assemblage  of  details,  and  learning  in  this 
fashion  its  entirety  as  the  system  in  which  these  details 
have  their  meaning.  The  work  a  judge  has  to  do  when 
he  hears  and  tries  a  case  in  Court  is  not  simply  to  draw 
an  inference  as  to  whether  a  certain  state  of  facts  fall 
under  an  abstract  principle  of  law.  His  main  task  is  to 
ascertain  the  true  relations  involved  in  what  is  proved  in 
evidence,  to  weld  the  facts  interpreted  in  these  relations 
into  a  whole  in  his  mind,  and  to  consider  the  juridical 
significance  of  the  whole  when  so  conceived  and  not 
before  it  seems  to  him  to  have  become  adequately  so 
conceived.  In  this  way  a  juridical  and  authoritative 
decision,  a  new  fact  in  the  object-world  of  society,  is 
brought  into  being  by  mind.  The  analogue  of  such  pro- 
cesses of  finite  mind  guides  us  in  framing  an  idea  of  what 
must  be  the  character  of  mind  that  is  not  finite — in  other 
words,  that  has  all  levels  within  itself  as  a  realised 
entirety.  In  the  first  place  what  we  have  to  think  of  is 
not  a  mind,  but  mind.  Our  own  relations  to  our  fellow- 
men  in  our  conversations  with  them,  relations  which 
depend  on  the  recognition  of  identity  in  thought,  indicate 
this  direction.  In  the  second  place  we  must  not  think 
of  its  object  as  foreign  to  such  mind,  or  as  known  except 
as  what  falls  within  it.  Here  the  extended  and  most 
general  form  of  the  principle  of  relativity  furnishes  us 
with  the  clue.  In  the  third  place  we  must  not  represent 
to  ourselves  end  and  means  as  falling  apart.  Time  if 
transcended  is  not  abolished.  It  is  no  question  of  a  totum 
simul  that  is  before  us.  But  time  is,  on  the  other  hand,  no 
longer  invested  with  the  notion  of  absolute  self-subsistence, 
or  with  that  of  more  than  form  dependent  on  standpoint. 
It  seems  to  follow  that  for  mind,  conceived  as  the  indica- 
tions thus  direct  us  to  conceive  it  when  in  final  and  perfect 
completion,  thought  and  creation  cannot  be  otherwise  than 
ultimately  inseverable  in  conception.  For  the  process  of 
knowledge  is  no  longer  one  conditioned  by  time.  Rather 
does  it  itself  condition  time.  All  possible  standpoints  are 
embraced,  embraced  not  as  separate  units,  but  as  aspects 
within  one  entirety,  aspects  each  of  which  has  its  sub- 


THINKING    AND    FEELING  397 

ordinate  place  in  the  hierarchy  of  a  comprehension  that 
is  ideally  all-embracing  and  perfect. 

Of  such  comprehension  we  find,  as  I  have  said,  analogues 
within  our  own  minds,  although  analogues  which  can  but 
give  direction  to  the  thought  and  feeling  that  inspire  each 
other  and  lift  us  beyond  ourselves.  To  perfect  compre- 
hension, in  which  feeling  and  reflection  cannot  be  separate 
or  exclusive,  they  do  not  lift  us.  They  may  fill  us  with 
emotional  contentment  by  the  indications  they  suggest 
of  our  close  relationship  to  the  infinite.  Feeling  as  it  is 
awakened  in  us  by  art  and  by  religion  can  so  lift  us,  when 
it  is  of  the  quality  that  suggests  analogy  between  the 
human  and  the  divine.  It  is  the  emotions  of  this  type 
that: 

"  Be  they  what  they  may, 
Are  yet  the  fountain  light  of  all  our  day, 
Are  yet  a  master  light  of  all  our  seeing ; 
Uphold  us,  cherish,  and  have  power  to  make 
Our  noisy  years  seem  moments  hi  the  being 
Of  the  eternal  silence ;    truths  that  wake, 
To  perish  never  1  " 

But  while  art  and  religion  and  natural  goodness  of  dis- 
position may  produce  this  sense  of  peace,  there  is  that 
which  they  cannot  accomplish.  When  reason  has  made 
wounds,  then  only  reason  can  adequately  heal  them.  That 
is  why  for  the  complete  approach  to  God  the  great  thinkers 
of  the  past  have  insisted  on  the  necessity  of  adding  to  art 
and  to  religion  knowledge.  For  only  on  knowledge  as  the 
foundation  can  we  raise  an  edifice  which  is  not  in  peril  of 
being  shaken  by  the  convulsions  to  which  all  that  is  based 
on  subjectivity  is  liable.  Even  knowledge  itself,  however 
penetrating  and  profound,  and  however  great  the  sense 
of  command  it  may  give,  shares  to  some  degree  with  the 
heart  "  the  vassalage  that  binds  her  to  the  earth."  For 
as  Wordsworth  again  says  : 

"  Distempered  nerves 

Infect  the  thoughts  ;    the  languor  of  the  frame 
Depresses  the  soul's  vigour." 

That  is  because  mind  in  us  shapes  itself  in  human  form, 
with  the  resulting  feebleness  that  ever  attends  our  human 
personality. 
Still,  when  all  has  been  said  that  can  be  said  about  the 

27 


398  THE  RELATION  OF  MAN  TO  GOD 

dependence  in  mankind  of  mind  on  matter,  the  fact 
remains  that  the  effort  which  man  can  make  when  he 
reflects  is  limitless  in  its  scope.  It  is  true  that  his  capacity 
to  wield  his  instrument  may  be  affected  in  the  ways  that 
Wordsworth  speaks  of,  and  that : 

"  Reason,  best  reason,  is  to  imperfect  man 
An  effort  only,  and  a  noble  aim  ; 
A  crown,  an  attribute  of  sovereign  power, 
Still  to  be  courted,  never  to  be  won." 

Yet  "  the  wonderful  might  of  thought,"  as  it  was  called 
by  Hegel,  remains  unrestricted ;  unrestricted  because 
there  are  no  problems  excepting  those  that  it  has  itself 
created. 

"  Irks  care  the  crop-full  bird  ?  Frets  doubt  the  maw- 
crammed  beast  ?  "  It  is  man  only  that  is  so  troubled,  and 
that  because  he  is  allied  to  God.  In  man  the  infinite  is 
inherent  and  of  his  essence.  That  is  why  he  is  not  satisfied 
unless,  either  through  feeling  or  through  thought,  it  has 
come  to  him  that  he  is  more  than  he  has  taken  himself  to  be. 

We  return  to  the  principle  which  has  been  throughout 
these  pages  the  basis  of  the  analysis.  Mind  is  foundational 
to  reality  in  all  its  forms.  Not  a  mind,  for  to  speak  of 
a  mind  is  to  treat  knowledge  as  a  mere  instrument,  as 
a  particular  thing,  as  something  which  might  properly  be 
interpreted  through  the  conception  of  substance.  But 
that  conception  and  every  other  form  of  the  actual 
and  the  ideal,  alike  fall  within  knowledge.  Its  dis- 
tinctions are  those  that  itself  it  makes.  Subject  and 
object,  conception  and  feeling,  thinking  and  willing, 
these  all  arise  as  of  separate  characters  only  in  virtue  of 
differences  which  the  activity  that  is  of  the  essence  of 
reflection  establishes.  Outside  knowledge,  interpreted  in 
this  larger  significance,  we  cannot  get.  And  if  we  desire 
to  find  from  the  analogy  of  our  own  knowledge  its  nature 
as  passing  beyond  the  limited  experience  that  is  ours, 
we  must  at  no  point  forget  that  knowledge  is  in  its  fullest 
aspect  foundational,  and  we  must  seek  its  character  in 
the  study  of  its  works  bearing  this  in  mind. 

The  distinctions  which  we  make  between  the  mediate 
and  the  immediate  contents  of  our  consciousness,  the 
fashion  in  which  by  abstraction  we  define  and  separate 
out  our  standpoints  and  the  conceptions  that  belong  to 


HUMAN    KNOWLEDGE  899 

them,  the  contrasts  we  establish  between  the  relative  and 
what  we  take  to  be  absolute,  are  all  of  them  the  outcome  of 
the  purposes  we  pursue  in  arranging  our  results  in  forms 
which  by  reason  of  our  finitude  we  seek  in  order  to  give 
them  distinctness.  Abstraction  as  the  outcome  of  con- 
centration on  particular  ends  is  everywhere  present.  Now 
it  is  just  this  kind  of  distinction  and  division  that  must 
be  regarded  as  no  longer  final  in  knowledge  as  foundational 
to  reality.  That  such  distinctions  and  divisions  must  be 
assumed  as  in  a  degree  preserved  in  even  knowledge  at 
this  level,  the  knowledge  which  is  both  last  and  first,  and 
has  all  its  purposes  as  part  of  and  within  its  own  nature, 
seems  clear.  For  they  are  the  creations  and  outcome  of 
that  knowledge,  although  their  emphasis  is  due  to  the 
finite  forms  it  gives  itself.  I  cannot  agree,  as  I  have 
already  said,  in  thinking  that  knowledge  of  this  kind  can 
be  different  in  character  from  human  knowledge,  or  that 
the  discursive  and  relational  character  of  our  reflection 
prevents  us  from  at  least  interpreting  that  character.  For 
it  is,  after  all,  only  by  reflection  that  we  are  led  to  conceive 
it  as  an  ideal  after  which  we  are  to  seek.  Its  character 
must  surely  be  that  of  thought  which,  as  Aristotle  and 
Plotinus  declared  long  ago,  knows  itself  in  its  object  and 
its  object  in  itself.  End  and  means,  mediacy  and  im- 
mediacy, are  separated  in  it  by  no  abstractions  that  remain. 
For  the  dialectical  activity  that  is  of  the  essence  of  thought 
in  the  only  form  in  which  we  can  attach  meaning  to  it 
supersedes  such  abstractions  as  soon  as  made. 

Goethe's  saying  that  "  man  never  knows  how  anthropo- 
morphic he  is  "  has  a  wide  application.  For  man  is  ever 
prone  to  fashion  God  in  his  own  likeness,  as  a  being  with 
attributes  that  resemble  his  own  and  are  really  human. 
Theologians  and  even  philosophers  are  apt  to  let  the 
purposes  of  the  moment  control  them,  and  to  apply 
limited  categories  which  are  appropriate  only  for  lower 
standpoints  to  what  has  meaning  only  from  the  highest 
and  most  comprehensive  standpoint  of  all.  The  infinite 
foundation  of  all  thinking  as  well  as  of  all  being  cannot 
be  substance  but  must  be  subject  whose  object  is  nothing 
that  is  outside  itself.  It  is  in  this  sense  that  God  is 
immanent.  It  is  the  great  principle  of  the  relativity  of 
all  man's  knowledge  that  compels  him  to  look  for  the 
form  in  which  that  relativity  reconciles  itself  with  final 


400  THE   RELATION  OF  MAN  TO   GOD 

truth  by  simply  observing  how  knowledge  develops  itself 
within  his  own  mind.  He  must  not  allow  his  human 
purposes,  for  instance  his  desire  to  present  to  himself  the 
Almighty  in  pictorial  and  vivid  form,  to  deflect  him  in 
the  use  of  his  method.  If  he  yields  to  what  is  a  powerful 
temptation  he  becomes  anthropomorphic  at  once.  The 
strength  of  art  and  of  religion  lies  in  their  power  of 
inspiring  emotion  of  a  high  quality,  high  because  its 
interpretation  in  thought,  which  cannot  easily  express 
what  it  strives  after  except  in  the  symbolism  of  feeling, 
is  itself  of  a  high  order.  In  doing  this  they  resort 
inevitably  to  the  use  of  metaphor,  and  in  using  it  they 
become  pictorial  and  make  the  God  they  are  seeking  to 
realise  for  us  appear  as  He  is  not.  Such  metaphors  are  yet 
of  high  value  for  the  quality  of  the  immediate  consciousness 
of  which  they  are  expressions.  Of  this  nothing  else  can 
indeed  take  the  place.  When  the  quality  is  great  enough 
these  metaphors  can  at  least  suggest  a  standpoint  which 
they  cannot  express.  But  they  must  always,  if  they  are 
not  to  land  us  in  controversy  and  confusion,  be  care- 
fully guarded  by  reflection,  and  recognised  as  being, 
however  valuable  for  our  human  sustenance  in  spiritual 
life,  no  more  than  they  really  are,  that  is  to  say,  inadequate 
expressions  of  ultimate  truth.  For  the  mind  that  could 
take  in  at  once  all  standpoints  in  relativity  and  combine 
them  in  a  single  entirety  in  which  each  should  have  its 
place  and  no  more  than  its  place,  resort  to  metaphor 
would  be  wholly  superseded.  It  is  the  apparent  divorce 
of  sense  and  thought  which  the  finitude  of  mind  and  its 
relativity  in  apprehension  brings  about  that  gives  the 
occasion  for  the  necessity  of  this  symbolism. 

If  thought  as  it  shapes  itself  in  the  mind  of  man  is 
abstract,  it  is  yet  powerful  in  virtue  of  that  abstractness. 
For  the  abstract  character  is  the  outcome  of  limitation  in 
purpose,  a  limitation  of  purpose  that  is  essential  for  finite 
capacity.  He  who  would  accomplish  anything  has  to  limit 
himself.  The  necessary  abstraction  has  its  compensation 
in  the  range  which  it  confers  on  intelligence.  Mathematics 
affords  an  illustration  of  this.  Its  symbolism  enables 
quantitative  order  to  be  expressed  with  such  refinement 
that,  as  in  Einstein's  fundamental  equations,  even  the 
space  and  time  of  experience  can  be  dealt  with  concep- 
tually and  yet  in  symbols  that  retain  their  visualised 


THE    METHOD    OF    PHILOSOPHY  401 

precision.  The  so-called  intervals  between  his  point- 
events  are  measured  by  no  co-ordinates  that  we  ex- 
perience. They  are  in  this  respect  analogous  to  those 
categories  which  Kant  conceived  as  being  real  in  that  they 
made  schematisation  in  space  and  time  possible,  but  could 
not  themselves  be  represented  in  any  such  scheme.  They 
are,  in  other  words,  concepts  which  so  far  from  being 
derived  from  experience  are  that  through  which  alone 
experience  can  become  significant  and  so  real.  Meta- 
physics, like  mathematics,  can  advance  only  by  putting 
everything  that  is  irrelevant  to  its  end  out  of  sight.  That 
end  is  to  determine  the  ultimate  nature  of  reality.  This 
must  for  the  metaphysician  be  accomplished  by  the  use 
of  the  most  comprehensive  categories.  He  cannot  remain, 
like  his  colleague,  confined  in  his  studies  to  those  of  order 
in  externality.  Nor  is  he  concerned,  like  the  experimental 
physicist  or  the  chemist,  simply  with  causes,  or  like  the 
biologist  with  ends  and  the  conceptions  that  have  for 
their  language  that  of  life.  He  cannot  be  satisfied,  as  the 
psychologist  must  be,  by  holding  out  in  objective  fashion, 
yet  only  by  abstraction,  thinking  and  feeling  as  if  they 
were  processes  that  could  be  adequately  studied  as 
occurrences  in  space  and  time.  All  these  methods  have 
their  great  uses,  but  the  uses  are  for  purposes  which  are 
limited  and  relative  in  character,  and  must  be  restrained 
in  their  ambit. 

Now  the  ultimate  character  of  reality  cannot  be  studied 
under  such  limitations,  any  more  than  it  can  be  investigated 
by  what  is  really  an  analogous  method  of  abstraction,  the 
use  of  metaphors  drawn  from  the  surface  of  experience. 
We  are  dealing  with  conceptions,  but  with  conceptions 
that  have  to  extend  to  much  more  than  can  even  the 
point-events  and  world-lines  of  the  physicists.  We  have 
to  frame  conceptions  of  nothing  short  of  mind,  the  highest 
and  also  the  richest  of  what  it  is  possible  for  reflection  to 
grasp,  because  it  is  that  to  which  all  else  must  in  ultimate 
analysis  be  referred.  In  this  sense  mind,  because  it  is 
what  is  perfect  and  real  without  qualification,  is  that  which 
is  the  hardest  for  the  language  of  finitude  to  define. 
Within  it  all  abstractions  fall,  for  out  of  the  activity  of 
mind  they  all  proceed.  It  is  therefore  the  most  concrete  in 
the  hierarchy,  for  nothing  even  appears  to  fall  outside  it, 
except  in  virtue  of  some  distortion.  It  is  no  instrument 


402  THE  RELATION  OF  MAN  TO  GOD 

that  can  be  taken  up  or  laid  down,  or  subjected  to  outside 
scrutiny.  For  the  taking  up  and  the  laying  down,  and 
the  very  scrutiny  and  the  testing  of  the  truth  thereby, 
are  its  own  act  and  assume  its  validity.  It  must  therefore 
study  itself,  not  from  without  but  from  within,  in  its 
awareness  of  its  own  working,  in  its  consciousness  of 
itself.  Even  so  the  task  is  hard  for  the  mind  that  sets 
itself  to  explore  a  field  that  for  it  has  no  limit.  It  is  only 
in  general  conceptions  by  means  of  which  reflection  passes 
beyond  immediacy  in  feeling,  that  mind  can  for  us  express 
its  own  self -consciousness  and  describe  its  own  nature. 

It  is  thus  to  self-consciousness  disclosing  its  character 
as  it  does  in  man  that  we  come  back  as  the  source  of 
our  knowledge  of  God.  The  wonderful  might  and  range 
of  thought  exhibit  themselves  here  as  without  limit,  even 
when  in  the  form  which  Mr.  Bradley  has  called  relational 
and  discursive.  For  that  it  is  a  relational  and  discursive 
form  does  not  in  itself  render  our  task  impossible.  There 
is  no  barrier  which  prevents  us  from  interpreting  what  is 
implied  by  the  higher  degree  of  reality  which  must  dis- 
tinguish mind  as  it  is  in  God  from  what  it  is  in  man.  Eye 
cannot  see  and  ear  cannot  hear  it,  for  its  nature  does  not 
admit  of  its  being  seen  or  heard,  excepting  so  far  as  it 
may  be  represented  in  forms  belonging  to  the  lower 
degrees  within  its  nature  to  which  the  senses  of  mind  with 
organic  form  belong.  But  thought,  even  when  as  it 
always  is  for  us  relational  and  discursive,  is  no  static  event 
in  externality  or  in  time.  Its  nature  is  to  be  conceptual, 
and  as  conceptual  to  be  identical  in  all  its  differences. 
The  consciousness  of  man  is  not  a  different  thing  from 
the  consciousness  of  God.  Man  and  God  are  not  numeri- 
cally distinct  subjects  in  knowledge.  They  are  the  one 
foundational  mind,  disclosing  itself  in  different  degrees 
or  logical  stages  in  the  progress  of  reality,  but  as  identical 
throughout  divergences  in  form.  It  is  the  identity  that 
underlies  the  correspondence  of  our  thoughts  and  renders 
them  what  they  are  that  relates  man  to  his  fellow-man. 
It  is  the  same  identity  in  difference  that  relates  him  to  God. 

If  this  be  so  it  is  apparent  that  to  regard  the  finite  and 
the  infinite  mind  as  different  entities  is  only  to  court 
disaster  in  our  reasoning  about  them.  Difference  there 
is,  but  it  is  in  degree  in  reality,  and  it  is  a  difference  which 
is  intelligible  to  logic.  The  human  mind,  conditioned 


THE    NATURE    OF    GOD  403 

as  it  is  by  organic  hindrances  in  its  power  of  wielding  its 
instrument,  may  be  inadequate  to  a  complete  and  syste- 
matic presentation  even  in  abstract  concepts  of  what 
is  present  in  itself.  But  the  instrument  within  its  grasp 
is  not  inadequate,  for  that  instrument  is  just  mind  as 
such.  Our  approaches  to  the  ideal  may  be  asymptotic. 
But  it  is  a  false  image  that  makes  that  ideal  seem  to  be 
truly  something  far  away  and  unreachable.  God  is 
present  in  us,  and  it  is  in  God  that  our  fully  developed 
reality  must  centre. 

We  cannot  rise  above  our  own  level  in  existence.  But 
that  need  not  discourage  us.  It  is  in  the  present  realisa- 
tion of  the  ideal,  in  the  struggle  to  attain  to  it,  and  not  in 
the  actual  attainment  of  what  our  position  in  the  hierarchy 
of  reality  excludes  from  being  capable  of  final  and  closed 
fruition  by  us,  that  the  truth  for  us  lies.  Our  knowledge 
is  relative,  and  relative  it  must  remain.  But  if  we  know 
that  it  is  relative,  and  what  its  meaning  is,  and  the  place 
of  that  meaning  in  the  full  entirety  to  which  it  belongs, 
we  have  gained  what  we  require.  We  have  a  standpoint 
from  which  we  can  rise  above  that  which  is  really  below 
us,  and  we  have  equally  a  standpoint  at  which  we  can 
contemplate  our  significance  in  the  light  that  comes  from 
above.  From  above,  but  from  no  source  that  is  separate 
in  space  or  time  from  our  own  personality.  For  the  source 
is  one  that  lies  within  us  and  gives  to  self  the  significance 
which  it  possesses.  And  so  it  is  that  as  the  fashion  of 
this  world  passes  we  feel  moved  more  and  more  to  set 
our  feet  on  the  rock  that  is  abiding. 

It  is  the  conception  of  these  things  as  truth  that  under- 
lies what  is  greatest  in  reflective  poetry  and  in  religion 
itself.  These  teach  us  that  in  our  finiteness  there  is 
nothing  to  make  us  despair,  if  we  will  only  keep  before 
our  minds  that  our  ideal  is  one  that  is  present  with  us, 
and  not  afar  in  some  absolute  region  apart  which  we  know 
not.  It  is  in  the  quality  of  our  striving,  infinite  as  an 
ideal,  and  not  in  the  goal  which  if  attained  would  end 
the  striving,  that  truth  lies. 

"  Man,  therefore,  thus  conditioned  must  expect, 
He  could  not,  what  he  knows  now,  know  at  first ; 
What  he  considers  that  he  knows  to-day, 
Come  but  to-morrow,  he  will  find  misknown  ; 
Getting  increase  of  knowledge,  since  he  learna 
Because  he  lives,  which  is  to  be  a  man, 


404  THE  RELATION   OF  MAN  TO  GOD 

Set  to  instruct  himself  by  his  past  self ; 

First,  like  the  brute  obliged  by  facts  to  learn, 

Next,  as  man  may,  obliged  by  his  own  mind, 

Bent,  habit,  nature,  knowledge  turned  to  law, 

God's  gift  was  that  man  should  conceive  of  truth 

And  yearn  to  gain  it,  catching  at  mistake, 

As  midway  help  till  he  reach  fact  indeed, 

The  statuary  ere  he  mould  a  shape 

Boasts  a  like  gift,  the  shape's  idea,  and  next 

The  aspiration  to  produce  the  same  ; 

So,  taking  clay,  he  calls  his  shape  thereout, 

Cries  ever,  *  Now  I  have  the  thing  I  see '  ; 

Yet  all  the  while  goes  changing  what  was  wrought, 

From  falsehood  like  the  truth,  to  truth  itself."  1 

1  Robert  Browning,  "  A  Death  in  the  Desert." 


CHAPTER    XIX 

ETEENAL   LIFE 

THE  time  has  come  to  enter  upon  a  further  question. 
What  significance  are  we  to  attach  for  the  purposes  of 
the  accidents  and  limits  of  ordinary  life  to  the  ideal  of 
self-completion  implied  in  our  knowledge  of  God  as 
immanent  in  us  ?  Is  it  a  significance  that  in  an  intelligible 
fashion  discloses  that  ideal  as  any  sort  of  fact  actually 
attained  and  present  ? 

There  are  obviously  many  points  of  view  from  which 
ideal  self-completion  is  not  accomplished  in  particular 
experience.  Still,  it  may  be  a  present  and  shaping  end.  It 
may  mould  our  experience  in  a  fashion  such  as  that  in 
which  in  organic  life  the  impulse  to  fulfil  an  end  preserves 
continuous  form  amid  change  of  materials,  or  in  a  fashion 
such  as  that  in  which  the  universal  gives  meaning  to  the 
particular  in  what  is  actual  only  in  their  union.  There 
we  find  reality  attained  in  individual  shape  ;  in  an  activity 
that,  because  of  the  moment  in  it  of  what  is  general,  is 
ever  stretching  beyond  what  it  has  set  up  as  its  own 
limits.  Our  experience,  in  our  consciousness  of  self  in 
its  relation  to  the  world,  is  always  revealing  to  us  the 
ideal  as  at  all  events  an  immediately  present  and  impelling 
power.  At  a  degree  even  higher  than  that  exhibited 
in  organic  life  it  is  there,  and  always  as  dynamic  and 
continuous  in  its  process  of  self-accomplishment.  In 
knowledge  the  ideal  has  a  yet  higher  place  than  in  mere 
life.  For  it  appears  as  an  entirety  within  which  falls, 
distinguishable  as  if  self-subsistent  only  for  abstract 
reflection,  every  standpoint  from  which  mind  directs 
itself.  Relativity  arises  from  the  differentiations  so  made, 
and  it  is  the  ultimate  character  of  mind  to  establish  within 
its  all-embracing  ambit  these  differentiations  and  the 
reasons  for  them,  as  its  degrees  or  as  levels  attained  in  its 
own  progress  towards  self -completion  in  a  perfect  entirety 

405 


406  ETERNAL  LIFE 

It  is  so  that  the  principle  of  relativity  in  knowledge  seems 
in  ultimate  analysis  to  find  its  justification  with  the  solution 
of  many  problems  in  consequence.  If  the  ideal  is  never 
present  as  a  self-contained  and  finally  accomplished  fact, 
it  is  not  the  less  the  foundation  and  meaning  of  finite 
activity.  Just  on  that  account  truth  and  freedom  from 
limitation  by  what  is  lower  are  attained  in  the  very 
quality  of  a  sustained  effort  towards  that  ideal. 

We  do  more  than  we  are  aware  of  when  we  thus  conceive 
and  dare.  We  do  not  stretch  out  our  hands  in  vain, 
moved  merely  by  love  of  the  shore  from  which  we  are 
divided.  We  are  conscious,  dimly,  it  may  be,  but  suffi- 
ciently, in  feelings  and  metaphors  that  spontaneously 
fashion  themselves,  of  a  transcendence  of  our  own  selves. 
The  real  is  within  and  not  apart  from  us. 

*'  With  wide-embracing  love, 
Thy  spirit  animates  eternal  years, 
Pervades  and  broods  above, 
Changes,  sustains,  dissolves,  creates,  and  rears. 

"  Though  earth  and  man  were  gone, 
And  suns  and  universes  ceased  to  be, 
And  Thou  wert  left  alone, 
Every  existence  would  exist  in  Thee. 

"  There  is  not  room  for  Death, 
Nor  atom  that  his  might  could  render  void, 
Thou,  Thou  art  Being  and  Breath, 
And  what  Thou  art  may  never  be  destroyed." 

Our  words,  when  we  utter  as  Emily  Bronte  thus  spoke, 
express  what  we  really  mean  by  God. 

Even  in  the  form  that  relativity  assumes  in  connection 
with  our  measurements  of  space  and  time  we  learned 
something  that  is  of  use  in  this  further  stage  of  our 
inquiry.  There  is  not  one  system  of  space  and  time 
in  contrast  with  which  the  others  are  subjective  perver- 
sions. Every  separate  system  is  relatively  as  real  as 
every  other.  So  when  we  pass  to  the  worlds  of  biology 
and  psychology  where,  not  systems  in  which  the  observer 
measures,  but  conceptions  which  he  employs  determine 
the  characteristic  reality  of  the  object  observed,  the  same 
lesson  becomes  apparent.  Change  in  standpoint  gives  no 
change  in  the  actual.  In  each  such  case  we  get  reality 
only  of  a  special  degree  or  kind,  but  it  is  not  the  less  on 
that  account  reality. 


THE    HUMAN    PROBLEM  407 

Now  this  must  be  so  equally  with  the  change  in  stand- 
point of  which  we  have  been  speaking  in  connection  with 
the  conception  of  immanence-  Here  is  yet  another  aspect 
in  which  mind  gives  birth  to  what  is  actual. 

Let  us  follow  this  out  in  its  reference  to  human  life.  A 
mother  loses  her  son.  She  is  broken  down  with  a  sorrow 
that  is  passionate.  Time  does  not  abate  that  sorrow. 
No  consolation  makes  it  seem  less.  For,  say  what  it  is 
possible  to  say,  still  the  hard  fact  remains.  The  touch 
of  a  vanished  hand  is  no  more,  and  the  tender  grace  of  a 
day  that  is  gone  never  returns.  Time  passes,  but  the  soul 
that  remembers  is  faithful.  She  does  not  think  out  in 
detail  what  she  longs  for.  She  herself  may  have  grown 
old,  and  her  son,  had  he  still  lived,  would  also  have  changed. 
But  none  the  less  she  longs  to  be  by  him  again.  It  is  not 
that  she  visualises  a  meeting  with  him — changed,  it  may 
be,  by  the  lapse  of  a  long  period,  changed  in  circumstances, 
in  age,  in  character.  Nor  does  she  think  definitely  how 
it  would  seem  to  him  if,  stereotyped  as  at  the  moment  of 
his  death  in  mind  and  body,  he,  a  youth,  were  to  come 
to  find  his  mother  altered  and  grown  old.  What  above 
all  she  desires  is  that  if  they  meet  again  it  shall  be,  not 
as  strangers,  but  as  mother  and  son.  For  the  relationship 
is  one,  not  of  living  beings  in  their  mere  externality  to 
each  other,  but  of  spirit  to  spirit.  It  is  a  relationship, 
not  of  merely  separate  lives,  but  of  mind  to  mind, 
a  relationship  which,  as  we  saw  in  an  early  chapter, 
depends  on  correspondence,  on  identity  amid  difference, 
on  feeling  that  is  more  than  mere  particular  feeling.  It 
was  this  that  the  physical  organism  of  the  son  expressed 
for  his  mother  as  symbolic  of  his  personality.  The  inter- 
pretation was  and  remains  a  spiritual  one. 

Now  this  interpretation  would  not  remain  if  the  symbol 
were  altered  in  character,  and,  as  a  consequence,  the 
mother  does  not  really  desire  to  have  restored  in  another 
life,  unchanged  and  undeveloped,  a  being  for  whose  very 
existence  growth  and  development  were  essential.  The 
relationship  requires  continuous  self- alteration  for  its 
reality,  and  such  continuity  it  can  only  have  if  its  nature 
is  more  adequately  conceived.  It  is  therefore  not  sufficient 
that  a  life  beyond  the  grave  should  be  a  mere  repetition 
under  altered  and  divergent  circumstances  of  the  old 
life  here.  That  is  what  spiritualism  seems  to  overlook, 


408  ETERNAL  LIFE 

for  a  mere  repetition  must  prove  unsatisfying,  and  cannot 
be  sufficient  from  the  higher  point  of  view.  The  life  of 
which  it  tells  us,  as  of  something  brought  back  to  us  just 
as  it  has  always  been,  lacks  the  spiritual  advance  that  is 
needful.  What  makes  the  suggestion  additionally  un- 
attractive is  that  the  interpretation  may  have  been  filtered 
through  some  medium  of  no  high  quality.  As  Mrs. 
Bosanquet  has  expressed  it,  in  her  poem  "  Non  tali 
Auxilio"  : l 

"  Were  there  indeed  no  barrier  that  could  save 
Their  spirits  from  the  importunity 
Which  looks  to  necromancy  for  a  proof 
The  dead  will  talk  with  us,  nor  hold  aloof, 
Far  better  were  the  silence  of  the  grave 
Than  life  entangled  in  futility." 

From  one  outlook  the  son  that  death  took  became  an 
inert  physical  object  that  was  carried  away  in  a  coffin. 
But  is  there  no  other  aspect  of  his  death  ?  For  the  son, 
that  he  should  die  is  that  an  event  happens  within  his 
object- world,  bringing  about  the  termination  of  his 
relation  to  it  as  a  bodily  self  for  which  it  is  present.  He 
does  not  look  on  that  event  only  as  does  a  mind  apart. 
All  of  what  happens  falls  wholly  within  his  world,  an  object- 
world  that  is  no  external  thing  independent  of  another 
thing  called  his  mind.  For  both  belonged  to  the  entirety 
in  knowledge  which  he  as  himself  mind  has  throughout 
expressed.  His  death  is  therefore  an  event  happening  to 
himself  as  his  own  object  within  that  object-world.  In 
its  fullest  aspect  it  was  an  event  for  his  mind  and  relatively 
to  it.  Apart  from  its  relation  in  its  place  in  nature  to 
that  through  which  alone  nature  is  possible,  it  has  no 
meaning  at  this  standpoint  and  no  reality. 

Just  as  Newtonian  space  proves  to  have  merely 
relative  reality  when  the  character  of  space  is  more  fully 
comprehended ;  just  as  independent  nature  is  seen  to  be 
unreal  if  separated  from  the  interpretations  which  it 
receives  in  and  for  knowledge ;  so  death  becomes  unreal 
for  the  mind  which  it  affects  solely  as  a  physical  event 
in  its  world.  It  is  an  actual  event,  but  actual  only  in  so 
far  as  knowledge,  confined  to  a  definite  but  not  final  level, 
has  invested  it  with  a  reality  that  is  relative.  For  mind 

1  In  the  little  volume  entitled  Zoar,  written  by  her  husband  and  herself. 


DEATH  409 

reaching  over  it  as  over  a  particular  happening  within  its 
own  experience  it  possesses  a  different  aspect. 

Nor  has  this  been  so  only  for  the  dying  man.  It  is  so 
also  for  her  who  has  been  the  spectator  of  his  passing 
from  her.  For  the  mother,  if  her  outlook  is  of  a  character 
wide  enough,  feels  it,  even  though  she  cannot  express  her 
feeling  in  words.  She  knows,  dimly  it  may  be,  but  as  she 
holds  certainly,  that  all  was  not  sufficiently  recorded 
when  what  was  the  son  she  loved  was  carried  away  from 
her  to  be  laid  in  the  earth.  By  faith,  the  sense  of  things 
unseen,  because  demanding  vision  of  a  higher  order  in 
knowledge,  she  is  aware  that  it  is  not  so.  And  inspired 
by  her  sense  of  higher  truth  she  may  exclaim,  "  O  death, 
where  is  thy  sting  ?  O  grave,  where  is  thy  victory  ?  " 

Do  not  let  us  misinterpret  the  scene.  At  its  own 
level  in  the  orders  of  knowledge  and  reality,  death  is 
an  event  as  actual  as  it  is  sorrowful.  But  at  a  stand- 
point belonging  to  a  different  order  it  has  another 
meaning  altogether,  a  meaning  in  which  death  does  not 
touch  the  subject-self.  This  self  is  no  transitory  physical 
object  intelligible  merely  as  such.  To  interpret  death 
adequately  a  highly  important  standpoint  has  to  be  taken 
into  account  from  which  the  self  is  recognised  as  what 
is  not  simply  a  physical  organism.  Even  at  that  for 
which  death  is  an  event  belonging  to  nature  there  is  a 
meaning  that  is  more  than  individual.  As  the  life  of  the 
human  organism  had  a  beginning,  so  it  must  have  a  ter- 
mination. The  living  being  exists,  not  as  a  bare  par- 
ticular, but  as  a  member  of  his  kind,  as  an  individual  who 
must  pass  away,  so  far  as  he  is  one  among  other  individuals 
in  a  natural  world,  in  the  interests  of  the  species  to  which 
he  belongs.  He  has  other  ends,  too,  which  he  has  to  fulfil 
in  general  interests  analogous.  He  belongs  to  his  country, 
and  it  may  be  that  he  can  only  fulfil  his  duty  by  dying 
for  it.  He  may  be  called  on  to  wear  his  life  out  for  the 
sake  of  those  who  depend  on  him  or  for  the  sake  of  his 
neighbours.  He  lives  in  and  through  an  environment 
that  entails  duties  towards  society  and  not  merely  towards 
himself.  That  he  should,  after  his  life  has  run  its  course, 
pass  away  in  the  form  in  which  he  has  lived,  is  accordingly 
as  natural  as  that  he  should  have  come  into  being.  If 
that  course  is  interrupted  by  premature  death,  such 
interruption  is  due  to  the  contingency  belonging  to  all 


410  ETERNAL  LIFE 

that  is  external.  But  in  truth  it  is  quality  and  not 
quantity  that  is  important. 

It  seems,  therefore,  that  it  is  the  self  regarded  as  subject, 
at  a  degree  in  reality  of  a  character  which  belongs  to 
what  is  higher  than  the  mere  time  series,  that  the  mother 
must  think  of  for  comfort  in  her  bereavement.  It  seems, 
too,  that  it  is  in  this  aspect  that  she  does  just  in  fact 
look  at  the  self  the  external  symbol  of  which  is  no  longer 
present.  Reappearance  on  earth  as  a  phenomenal 
body  there,  attended  as  it  would  be  with  ever-occurring 
changes  and  breaches  in  the  continuity  of  a  personality 
that  implies  life  in  nature,  could  never  give  her  back  the  old 
tie  unbroken  in  its  highest  possible  form.  It  is  for  this 
reason  that  spiritualism  seems  to  me  to  miss  the  true 
point.  I  will  not  discuss  the  results  of  observation  of 
which  its  votaries  are  convinced,  for  I  do  not  know  with 
the  accuracy  that  is  essential  what  they  are  or  what  they 
mean.  Experience  in  Courts  of  law  has  taught  me  how 
misleading  and  how  fragmentary  such  records  are  apt 
to  prove.  People  offer  not  merely  the  facts,  but  their 
own  inferences  inextricably  mixed  up  with  them,  even 
when  acting  with  passionate  desire  for  truth.  I  have 
learned  from  observation  the  necessity  of  calling  in 
question  closely  all  testimony  that  is  not  only  faithfully 
and  deliberately  offered  under  sanctions  that  enjoin 
the  nearest  practicable  approach  to  accuracy  in  detail, 
but  that  is  not  also  sifted  by  skilled  cross-examination 
scientifically  directed.  Nearly  everything  that  I  read, 
even  of  what  is  written  down  by  the  best  kind  of 
spiritualists,  is  open  to  criticism  of  this  kind.  The 
application  of  a  sifting  procedure  such  as  that  of  a 
Court  of  Justice  appears  to  be  highly  desirable  before 
such  testimony,  even  from  the  most  honourably  inten- 
tioned  witnesses,  is  accepted  as  a  basis  for  inference. 
Moreover,  so  far  we  know  but  little  of  the  phenomena  of 
what  is  called  telepathy,  a  quality  of  mind  which  may 
still  reveal  much  that  is  new  in  a  yet  strictly  natural  order. 
Nor  have  we  yet  studied  exhaustively  the  content  that 
lies  below  what  is  directly  present  to  consciousness,  and 
is  hidden  in  the  apparently  inexhaustible  pit  of  the  ego  ! 

But  the  other  interpretation  of  immortality  stands  on 
a  different  footing.  The  soul  has  here  a  different  meaning. 
It  culminates  in  personality  with  an  aspect  other  than 


IMMORTALITY  411 

that  of  mere  nature  with  its  time  system.  To  the  time 
series  the  mind  of  course  stands  in  an  essential  relation. 
Of  this  relation  we  found  early  an  illustration  in  Professor 
Whitehead's  analysis  of  the  function  of  sense- awareness 
in  making  a  congruent  world  possible.  It  is  in  the  self 
that  the  universe  centres,  and  it  is  in  the  self  in  another 
aspect,  of  a  kind  isolated  by  the  abstractions  we  have  to 
make  in  reflection,  that  we  find  an  object  among  a 
multitude  resembling  itself  in  nature.  It  is  in  our  indi- 
vidual experience  that  these  two  standpoints  are  brought 
together  in  a  reality  which  the  two  views  taken  in  separa- 
tion present  only  partially.  There  is  nothing  in  point  of 
principle  more  baffling  in  such  an  idea  than  there  is  else- 
where in  that  of  the  relative  reality  of  the  different  degrees 
in  knowledge.  In  the  experience  of  the  concrete  individual 
we  find  the  distinction  drawn,  and  we  find  it  drawn  in 
emotion  as  well  as  in  reflection.  That  is  because  the 
individual  is  throughout  concrete,  and  his  mental  activity 
lies  as  much  in  feeling  as  it  does  in  reflection.  The  two 
are  inseparable  in  the  actual  life  of  mind,  and  are  unreal 
in  any  attempted  separation.  Thus  we  always  present 
our  ideas  in  images,  but  in  images  that  are  significant 
and  fraught  with  meaning. 

When,  then,  we  interpret  immortality  in  the  larger 
sense  as  life  that  is  eternal  as  being  more  than  appears 
in  the  time  series,  we  fashion  images  which  import  this. 
These  images  may  have  spatial  and  temporal  forms. 
They  are  generally  only  metaphorical,  but  they  are  symbolic 
of  what  itself  is  of  no  character  that  is  either  spatial  or 
temporal.  This  is  the  entirety  to  which  we  have  so  often 
referred,  that  whose  aspects  are  distinguished  in  the 
different  forms  of  knowledge,  forms  whose  standpoints  all 
fall  within  the  whole  to  which  they  belong  as  modes  of 
its  partial  expression.  In  art  we  have  the  entirety  revealed 
in  representations  which,  when  they  come  to  us,  born  of 
the  mind  of  a  great  genius,  we  may  feel  to  be  adequate, 
inasmuch  as  we  have  no  higher  standard  of  the  same 
order  by  which  to  get  beyond  them.  In  art  the  particular 
and  the  universal,  the  symbol  and  what  it  signifies,  may 
be  fused  in  a  perfection  of  form  that  is  inseparable  from 
the  matter  to  which  the  form  is  given.  The  work  of  art 
is  in  this  way  apparently  immediate.  It  has  been  born, 
not  of  nature,  but  of  mind,  and  yet  in  that  birth  from  mind 


412  ETERNAL  LIFE 

so  directly  and  fully  endowed  that  in  it  there  is  little 
work  left  for  reflection  to  do  in  bringing  what  is  particular 
into  harmony  with  what  is  general.  The  perfect  individual 
symbol  speaks  and  interprets  to  us  for  itself. 

In  religion  there  is  something  analogous.  Its  char- 
acteristic is  that  the  relation  of  the  self  to  the  entirety  in 
which  its  reality  lies  is  the  relation  of  man  to  God.  Here, 
again,  it  is  not  in  general  conceptions  that  the  relationship 
is  currently  rendered.  It  is  in  images  and  symbols  fraught 
with  inherent  meaning,  just  as  in  a  great  picture.  Only 
the  feeling  is  feeling  that  is  yet  more  absorbing  than  that 
of  the  artist.  For  it  is  the  feeling  of  life  beyond  time 
gained  in  the  submission  and  surrender  of  the  life  that 
belongs  to  time,  and  by  the  whole-hearted  acceptance  of  the 
fact  of  finiteness.  We  have  to  be  in  another  world  while 
yet  in  this  one.  We  are  what  we  seem  to  be,  and  yet  as 
we  seem  to  be  we  know  we  are  not  real.  We  feel  that  we 
must  rise  above  our  natural  selves. 

"  God  harden  me  against  myself, 
This  coward  with  pathetic  voice 
Who  craves  for  ease,  and  rest,  and  joys ; 

"  Myself,  archtraitor  to  myself  ; 
My  hollowest  friend,  my  deadliest  foe, 
My  clog  whatever  road  I  go. 

"  Yet  One  there  is  can  curb  myself, 
Can  roll  the  strangling  load  from  me, 
Break  off  the  yoke  and  set  me  free."  1 

It  is  the  whole-souled  acceptance  of  the  new  outlook 
on  existence,  the  determination  to  deny  the  mere  will  to 
live,  and  to  seek  the  whole  in  indifference  to  self-interest, 
that  matters  in  religion.  It  is  not  victory,  in  the  form 
of  an  outward  good  to  be  gained  for  the  soul,  that  counts ; 
it  is  in  the  effort  itself  and  in  its  quality  that  deliverance 
is  attained.  The  old  outlook  is  superseded  and  a  new  one 
adopted.  To  some  men  this  new  outlook  comes  in  the 
shape  of  the  emotion  that  is  intuitively  known  to  be 
religious  because  of  the  meaning  with  which  it  is  fraught, 
a  meaning  that  emerges  in  the  sense  of  its  inherent  value 
in  comparison  with  all  besides.  To  other  men  the  new 
outlook  arrives  as  the  result  of  prolonged  reflection  or  of 
intellectual  insight.  Yet  others  have  something  of  both 
kinds.  It  is  an  error  to  suppose  that  a  religious  attitude 
1  Christina  Rossetti,  "  Who  shall  deliver  me  ?  " 


THE    SIGNIFICANCE    OF    RELIGION  413 

cannot  have  its  origin  in  the  conviction  that  comes  of 
logic.  Spinoza  was  above  all  a  thinker,  and  his  thinking 
brought  him  to  conclusions  sufficiently  clear  to  enable 
God  to  be  revealed  under  them.  That  the  form  was 
abstract  in  character  was  for  a  mind  such  as  his  no  draw- 
back. 

But  for  most  men  and  women  religion,  although, 
different  from  both,  will  always  resemble  philosophy  less 
than  it  does  art.  For  it  depends  for  the  majority  on 
quality  in  creative  imagery,  and  is,  moreover,  of  a  practical 
rather  than  of  a  theoretical  nature.  That  is  why  people 
gain  strength  by  worship  in  common  in  a  visible  church, 
consecrated  to  the  God  whose  presence  to  them  they  there 
hope  to  realise  through  the  stimulation  of  actual  practice. 

Taken  in  its  largest  meaning  philosophy  excludes  no 
standpoint  that  belongs  either  to  art  or  to  religion.  But 
its  path  is  too  steep  and  too  hard  to  be  available  for  the 
great  majority.  If  its  conclusions  are  to  be  made  of 
general  application  this  must  be  done  through  leaders  of 
the  people,  in  religion,  in  art,  in  knowledge  generally, 
who  are  willing  to  teach  and  apply  its  lessons.  I  think 
that  the  greatest  lesson  that  it  can  yield  to-day  is  that 
the  relativity  of  knowledge  has  among  its  consequences 
this,  that  all  forms  of  knowledge  are  reconcilable  if  con- 
strued as  aspects  within  one  entirety.  This  is  a  lesson 
which  we  saw  exemplified  in  physical  science.  We  saw 
it  also  illustrated  in  biological  science  by  the  fitting  in, 
when  properly  understood,  of  the  methods  of  physics  and 
chemistry  with  the  recognition  of  the  essence  of  organic 
life  as  to  be  sought  in  a  controlling  end.  We  traced  the 
same  principle,  that  of  distinguishing  realities  into  aspects 
as  distinguished  from  entities,  in  psychology  and  the 
science  of  the  state.  It  would  be  easy  to  follow  out  the 
lesson  in  the  treatment  of  other  subjects,  such  as  economics. 
The  statistician  obtains  his  results  by  surveying  the 
evidence  of  certain  common  purposes  in  great  assemblages 
of  human  beings  and  abstracting  attention  from  idiosyn- 
crasies which  do  not  affect  the  result  yielded  quantitatively 
by  his  method.  He  gets,  for  example,  little  information 
about  moral  qualities,  but  for  such  information  he  is  not 
searching ;  it  is  irrelevant  to  a  limited  purpose. 

But  relativity  is  also,  though  not  in  a  scientific  form, 
characteristic  of  the  standpoint  of  mankind,  not  only  in 
28 


414  ETERNAL   LIFE 

daily  judging  individuals  but  in  judging  other  nations 
than  their  own.  Of  this  we  see  daily  constant  and  curious 
illustrations.  From  a  book  on  English  Public  Finance, 
recently  published  by  the  New  York  Bankers'  Trust 
Company,  I  take  these  sentences,  from  p.  15  : 

"  Englishmen  and  their  newspaper  editors  delight  in 
heckling  and  finding  fault  with  the  Administration  as  we 
would  say ;  the  Government  as  they  would  say.  But  to 
the  observer  3,000  miles  away,  quietly  studying  the  figures 
without  any  other  object  than  to  get  at  the  facts,  the 
results  obtained  seem  little  short  of  marvellous.  They 
could  only  be  obtained  in  a  country  where  patriotism  runs 
so  high  that  the  people  demand  to  be  taxed  and  taxed 
heavily,  as  we  are  assured  was  the  case  in  England  during 
the  course  of  the  war." 

Here  is  national  relativity  indeed.  The  writer  has  fixed 
his  attention  on  the  circumstances  that  the  total  expendi- 
ture of  Great  Britain  in  the  six  years  of  the  war  exceeded 
the  aggregate  expenditure  of  the  preceding  two  and  a 
quarter  centuries,  and  that  over  36  per  cent  of  the  total 
expenditure  during  the  war  was  met  out  of  revenue.  His 
co-ordinates  of  reference  differ  from  those  of  the  average 
British  critic  at  home. 

It  is,  however,  in  the  deeper  meaning  of  the  principle 
of  relativity,  that  depending  for  its  application  on  funda- 
mental categories  or  conceptions  transformative  of  reality, 
that  we  have  been  inquiring  into  its  application  to  the 
problem  of  eternal  life.  In  the  scientific  light  which  the 
principle  so  applied  casts,  we  have  seen  how  the  problem 
arises  of  a  life,  not  continued  within  time,  but  in  its  full 
nature  independent  of  the  time  series.  We  drag  down, 
even  for  the  practical  purposes  of  those  immediately  con* 
cerned,  the  quality  of  the  conception  and  its  power  of  trans- 
forming reality  by  raising  it  to  another  order,  if  we  degrade 
it  into  unthinking  identification  with  that  of  a  resurrected 
or  independent  body  continuing  the  old  life  as  on  earth. 
It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  such  a  picture  does  not 
help  religion  but  hinders  it.  So  far  as  it  is  meant  to 
symbolise  death  as  the  gateway  to  another  life,  it  does 
so  by  metaphors  which  are  as  misleading  as  they  are 
inadequate.  For  we  saw  in  the  earlier  chapters  that  the 


THE    UNDERTAKER    AND    THE    EXECUTOR    415 

soul  and  the  body  are  riot  distinct  entities,  but  that  the 
former  is  just  the  organism  as  it  appears  at  a  higher 
level  in  knowledge.  Not  the  less  on  that  account  is  the 
level  one  from  which  we  get  fuller  reality,  as  full  as  that 
which  the  biologist  finds  in  life.  The  undertaker  and  the 
executor  have  their  proper  and  necessary  functions,  but 
in  a  lower  order  of  the  actual.  The  lesson  of  relativity 
warns  us  against  the  narrow  view  which  takes  the  reality 
of  different  orders  as  meaning  different  entities  competing 
with  each  other  for  the  title  to  be  accepted  as  actual.  It 
is  as  separate  aspects,  finding  their  relation  to  each  other 
within  the  whole  that  is  visible  only  to  a  perfected  know- 
ledge, that  their  true  significance  is  revealed.  Of  such  a 
perfected  whole  we,  who  are  more  than  we  take  ourselves 
to  be,  have  glimpses  in  art,  in  religion,  and  in  philosophy, 
in  each  case  in  a  different  way. 

For  us,  whose  world  is  in  everyday  life  envisaged  under 
the  finite  forms  due  to  our  conditioned  faculties,  a  direct 
and  pictorial  presentation  of  the  ultimate  unreality  of 
death  is  never  completely  accomplished.  The  veil  of 
Maya,  which  imperfect  understanding  is  ever  weaving 
for  us,  by  its  abstractions  leads  us  from  the  full  truth. 
Yet,  as  symbols  of  more  than  they  can  express  for  such 
partial  insight,  the  pictorial  representations  that  are 
common  have  their  use.  They  have  a  significance  that 
carries  us  beyond  them.  They  point  us  to  reality  at  a 
higher  level.  On  the  plane  of  our  lives  as  human  beings 
in  the  world  of  nature,  physical  and  social,  we  belong  to 
the  stream  of  the  events  which  we  experience.  These 
events  pass  away,  they  pass  inasmuch  as  the  order  to 
which  they  belong  is  one  of  succession.  Return  as  events 
in  this  succession  they  cannot.  For  their  essence  consists 
in  this,  that  they  should  lie  in  a  time  series.  Now  we 
have  only  to  look  at  the  fuller  character,  taken  by  itself, 
of  such  a  series  to  see  what  the  relation  of  events  in  it 
must  ultimately  prove  to  be.  Segregated  as  it  is  in  time, 
each  instant  succeeds  the  preceding  one  in  its  order.  The 
earlier  moment  has  gone  finally  when  the  second  one 
follows  it.  It  is  only  in  a  spatial  relationship  that  they 
are  recalled  or  are  distinguishable.  It  is  in  the  space 
system  that  it  involves  that  each  time  series  becomes 
actual  for  us  otherwise  than  as  a  mere  abstraction  of 
reflection.  The  moments  are  not  identical,  but  apart 


416  ETERNAL  LIFE 

from  space  they  are  indiscernible,  and  require  to  be  sus- 
tained in  memory  and  through  distinctions  which  only 
spatial  relations  make  possible.  Leibnitz  was  not  justified 
in  speaking  of  the  identity  of  indiscernibles.  There  may 
be  indiscernibles  without  identity.  What  he  says  is  only 
true  of  actual  and  individual  objects,  not  of  bare  events 
which  have  received  no  setting  or  construction  from  reflec- 
tion. When  we  die,  therefore,  in  so  far  as  we  are  mere 
objects  in  the  world  of  nature,  we  have  passed  as  the 
moment  in  the  time  series  passes,  excepting  inasmuch  as 
the  picture  constructed  in  reflection  remains  as  a  possession 
of  the  observer. 

But  this  is  only  half  of  the  truth.  For  the  succession 
in  the  time  series  would  be  impossible  excepting  as  held 
together  and  unified  in  the  knowledge  for  which  it  is. 
That  knowledge  cannot  itself  be  an  object  or  event  in  the 
series,  for  it  is  only  through  it  that  the  series  has  a  possible 
existence.  There  are  thus  two  factors  implied  in  our 
experience  of  events  in  time,  the  known  and  the  knower, 
and  the  latter,  in  so  far  as  it  is  subject  in  this  experience, 
is  above  the  plane  of  the  time  series,  just  as  it  is,  for  the 
same  reasons,  not  less  above  that  of  relationship  in  space. 
The  factors  are  not  separable  as  events  in  experience. 
But  it  is  the  distinction  between  them  which  explains  the 
meaning  of  our  recognition  of  the  triumph  of  the  spirit 
over  the  grave,  and  its  significance  for  knowledge.  We 
are  once  more  face  to  face  with  the  consequences  of  the 
principle  of  relativity. 

Now  if  we  apply  this  lesson,  the  first  thing  that  strikes 
us  is  that  we  find  in  it  a  justification  for  what  many 
of  those  whom  we  name  the  best  believe  in  with  their 
whole  souls,  the  significance  of  a  higher  life  that  is  beyond 
the  reach  of  the  all- severing  wave  of  time.  The  pictorial 
language  in  which  this  idea  is  expressed  is  the  language 
of  finite  knowledge.  It  is  therefore  inadequate,  for  its 
material  belongs  to  the  domain  of  an  order  in  knowledge 
that  is  not  the  highest.  But,  by  the  faith  which  is  the 
sense  of  an  order  yet  higher,  or  in  a  mysticism  which  may 
be  just  that  faith  under  another  name,  the  pictures  framed 
are  invested  with  a  meaning  which  gives  them  a  title  to 
recognition  as  symbolic.  Just  as  the  printer's  ink  is  the 
symbol  of  the  poet's  inspiration,  and  has  generally  interest 
for  us  as  if  real  in  no  other  sense,  so  the  imperfect  effort 


THE    PLAIN    MAN  417 

to  express  what  cannot  be  adequately  expressed  may 
conduct  us  to  a  reality  beyond  its  outward  form.  In  order 
to  make  intelligible  how  this  can  be  so,  the  principle  of  the 
relativity  of  knowledge  has  to  be  invoked.  But  the  plain 
man  does  not  need  to  understand.  He  is  satisfied  with 
what  the  direct  presentation  presses  on  him,  a  picture 
that  gives  him  the  sense  of  peace  and  contentment  and 
that  satisfies  his  highest  longing. 

In  an  often-quoted  sentence  in  the  preface  to  his  Appear- 
ance and  Reality,  Mr.  Bradley  throws  out  a  suggestion. 
"  Metaphysics,"  he  says,  "  is  the  finding  of  bad  reasons 
for  what  we  believe  upon  instinct,  but  to  find  these 
reasons  is  no  less  an  instinct."  In  these  words  he  guards 
himself  against  a  possible  accusation  of  taking  his  subject 
too  seriously.  So  long  as  metaphysics  is  separated  from 
the  rest  of  the  body  of  scientific  knowledge  the  meta- 
physician is  apt  to  lay  himself  open  to  this  suspicion. 
But  if  philosophy  be  nothing  segregated  from  the  remainder 
of  the  whole  system  of  knowledge,  but  applies  a  principle 
which  it  holds  in  common  with  every  branch  of  that 
system,  then  it  hardly  requires  defence  more  than  other 
modes  of  the  application  of  knowledge  do.  It  is  true  that 
its  standard  is  not  that  of  measurement,  but  in  this  it 
does  not  stand  alone,  and  it  has  at  least  all  the  justification 
for  its  conclusions  that  criticism  has  in  literature.  But 
Mr.  Bradley,  in  what  he  says,  is  really  warning  us  against 
pedantry,  the  undue  exaltation  of  the  abstract  mind.  His 
warning  is  one  which  those  who  are  disposed  to  regard 
lightly  the  faith  of  simple  minds  would  do  well  to  bear 
in  remembrance.  For  that  faith  is  in  itself  a  correction 
of  abstractions.  It  is  the  sense  of  the  fuller  significance 
of  experience. 

The  dying  man  may  have  before  him  no  picture  that  is 
clear  excepting  one  of  himself  as  passing  away  from  a 
world  which  he  and  others  imagine  as  continuing  after 
him.  It  does  not  disturb  him  that  this  should  be  so. 
For  he  has  the  sense  that  more  is  signified.  This  sense 
may  come  to  him  in  forms  that  vary.  The  firm  conclu- 
sions of  a  life  spent  in  thought  may  bring  it.  Or  it  may  be 
gained  in  the  consciousness  that  death  has  been  accepted 
because  it  was  a  duty  to  encounter  it.  Or,  again,  it  may 
come,  as  it  so  often  comes,  to  the  simple  mind  which 
religious  feeling  has  permeated.  If  the  dying  man  is  of 


418  ETERNAL   LIFE 

this  latter  sort  he  may  be  filled  with  a  faith  that  assures 
him  that  his  "  Redeemer  liveth."  If  it  be  so  he  is 
strong  and  victorious  not  less  than  is  he  who  holds  as 
his  final  thought  that  it  is  within  his  own  mind  that  the 
world  and  himself  as  in  it  are  passing,  and  that  in  his 
'grasp  of  this  fact  he  is  above  it  and  is  at  one  with  the 
eternal.  So  it  is  that  when  his  simple  creed,  pictorial 
it  may  be,  but  symbolical  of  fuller  reality  and  deeper 
significance,  bids  the  humblest  soul  in  his  greatest  and 
last  extremity  be  assured  that  he  is  in  the  presence  of 
God,  it  may  be  that  his  is  an  insight  differing  in  form  only 
from  that  of  the  profoundest  thinker. 

Such  seems  to  be  the  value  of  what  Wordsworth  has 
called  our  "  Intimations  of  Immortality."  Let  there  be 
no  self-deception  as  to  what  they  mean,  and  no  taking  of 
them  to  indicate  some  interruption  of  a  kind  that  is 
miraculous  of  the  order  of  experience  in  space  and  time. 
The  miraculous  is  what  violates  the  principles  of  the  order 
to  which  it  belongs.  What  I  am  speaking  of  imports  no 
such  violation.  Things  remain,  in  the  orders  in  which 
they  are  recognised  as  existing,  just  what  they  seem  to  be. 
But  their  significance  as  existing  is  changed  with  change 
in  standpoint,  and  their  reality  in  consequence  not  only 
has  an  altered  meaning,  but  is  an  altered  reality,  trans- 
formed in  the  new  order  to  which  it  now  belongs.  This 
conclusion  should  occasion  us  in  point  of  principle  no 
more  misgiving  than  the  conclusion  that  there  are  different 
systems  of  space  and  time,  according  with  differences  in 
systems  of  reference. 

The  case  of  the  self  in  its  aspect  of  externality  is  diver- 
gent from  these  last  referred  to,  but  in  circumstances  only. 
In  such  illustrations  as  those  physical  instances  we  can  by 
reflection  render  our  measurements  congruent  for  know- 
ledge if  we  realise  that  they  appear  as  they  do  because  of 
the  standpoint  adopted.  We  have,  for  example,  assumed 
ourselves  to  be  at  rest  and  to  be  at  liberty  to  employ  a 
certain  set  of  co-ordinates  of  reference  with  which  we  are 
familiarly  associated.  But  these  turn  out  to  have  been 
co-ordinates  forming  only  one  out  of  other  possible  sets. 
In  the  same  way,  although  we  can  use  mechanistic  con- 
ceptions to  interpret  the  living  organism  physically  and 
chemically  as  being  an  assemblage  of  molecules,  isolated 
and  merely  external  to  one  another,  we  have  made  the 


STANDPOINT   THE    KEY   TO    REALITY        419 

organism  have  this  character  by  our  employment  of  these 
conceptions,  and  we  may  have  to  give  this  standpoint  up, 
as  being  neither  exhaustive  nor  adequate,  if  we  are  to  get 
at  the  character  of  the  true  facts  of  life.  In  this  case  the 
change  of  standpoint  is  a  change  in  the  categories  or 
conceptions  under  which  we  direct  attention. 

It  is  this  latter  kind  of  readjustment,  not  of  the  standard 
of  reference  in  measurement  of  externality,  but  of  the 
category  employed,  that  we  have  to  make  if  we  would 
get  at  reality  in  what  we  name  as  eternal  life  or  as  God. 
But  in  all  cases  the  principle  is  the  same.  For  it  is  that 
the  standpoint  requires  critical  examination  before  we 
conclude  that  it  is  adequate  for  the  order  of  existence  in 
which  we  are  searching  for  the  real.  We  may  discover 
that  we  have  got  from  it  only  what  relatively  signifies 
reality,  and  that  for  the  interpretation  of  the  individual 
in  the  perfection  of  his  existence  an  outlook  and  a  set  of 
conceptions  more  completely  comprehensive  is  necessary. 

The  capacity  of  man  to  interpret  is  unlimited  in  its 
range,  because  the  range  of  mind  as  such  even  in  human 
form  is  unlimited  in  its  power  of  framing  general  con- 
ceptions. In  art  and  religion  mind  may  be  brought, 
apparently  directly  and  not  only  mediately,  into  the 
pictorial  consciousness  of  what  is  highest  in  its  own  nature. 
That  is  because  feeling  and  thinking  are  not  really  separate 
faculties.  Were  we  untrammelled  by  the  physical  organs 
through  which  mind  is  actual  in  us  we  should  not  find  it  so 
hard  to  realise  a  relation  which  demands  expression  even 
in  abstract  thinking  through  images  which  thought  has 
to  use.  So  far,  again,  as  feeling  is  concerned  it  is  fraught 
with  the  values  implied  and  recognised  in  it.  It  is  because 
of  this  defectiveness  of  form,  inherent  in  all  interpretation 
and  the  outcome  of  our  finite  natures,  that  things  are 
taken  to  be  no  more  than  they  seem  for  the  limited  purposes 
which  direct  our  attention  in  everyday  matters.  But  we 
are  capable  of  more  and  we  recognise  more  as  being  actual. 
If  death  cannot  appear  from  the  outlook  of  everyday  life 
to  be  other  than  what  judged  from  that  outlook  it  in  truth 
is,  a  calamity  which  may  entail  for  those  left  behind 
suffering  as  well  as  grief,  at  least  it  has  the  very  different 
aspect  of  which  I  have  now  spoken. 

Often,  too,  we  become  aware  that  their  deaths  have 
been  essential  for  giving  full  effect  to  the  life-work  of  the 


420  ETERNAL  LIFE 

greatest  among  us.  It  was  so  with  Jesus,  with  Caesar, 
with  Nelson,  with  countless  others  who  have  yielded  up 
their  lives  as  individual  men  in  order  to  make  those  of 
others  better.  The  personalities  of  these  great  ones  survive 
in  the  results  of  their  work,  and  their  deaths  have  been 
required  to  produce  the  lasting  results  of  that  work. 
Surely  it  is  as  wrong  to  think  of  them  as  the  mere  victims 
of  regrettable  forces  of  blind  nature  as  it  would  be  to 
desire  that  they  should  have  lived  on,  to  the  detriment, 
it  might  have  been,  of  the  causes  to  which  they  had 
consecrated  their  earthly  existence. 


CHAPTER    XX 

CONCLUDING   BEFLECTIONS 

THE  endeavour  to  accomplish  the  purpose  described  in 
the  first  chapter  has  now  been  made.  It  has  not  been 
merely  in  its  direct  bearing  on  particular  forms  of  know- 
ledge that  the  doctrine  of  degrees  has  seemed  to  afford 
new  light.  It  teaches  a  yet  more  general  lesson.  It 
furnishes  a  fresh  outlook  on  the  apparent  conflicts  disclosed 
throughout  the  story  of  reflective  thought.  It  enlarges 
our  conception  of  truth.  We  follow  the  development  of 
human  knowledge  with  a  deeper  insight  into  its  real  process. 
For  we  see  in  its  result  one  which  has  been  accomplishing 
itself  continuously,  and  which  is  founded  on  a  principle. 
The  principle  is  one  which  teaches  us  to  read  the  history  of 
philosophy  as  evolving  progressively  a  lasting  view  of  the 
foundation  of  reality,  a  view  remaining  substantially  con- 
stant in  varying  forms,  despite  temporary  changes  due  to 
alteration  in  modes  of  approach  attributable  to  periods 
and  circumstances.  Variations  there  have  been,  without 
doubt,  and  deflections  from  time  to  time.  But  these  are 
inseparable  from  the  freedom  of  human  personality  to 
concentrate  for  its  own  purposes  on  what  accords  with  its 
bent  at  the  moment.  The  larger  view  has  often  been 
temporarily  displaced,  but  always  to  return  clad  anew, 
to  reassert  its  power  over  the  human  mind.  In  the 
main  an  obvious  thread  has  remained  unbroken,  and  is 
seen  to  have  done  so  if  the  progress  is  surveyed  from 
beginning  to  end  and  as  a  whole.  Science  and  religion 
appear,  in  the  course  of  this  progress,  not  as  reconciled,  but 
as  in  no  antagonism,  inasmuch  as  they  are  concerned  with 
different  standpoints.  Their  results,  therefore,  are  dis- 
covered not  to  conflict  with  each  other,  if  studied,  as  they 
should  be  studied,  in  the  light  cast  by  relativity. 

The  field  of  knowledge  has  been  surveyed  and  its  general 
character  has  been  examined.    The  system  of  knowledge  as 

421 


422  CONCLUDING   REFLECTIONS 

an  entirety  has  seemed  in  the  end  to  disclose  itself  as  being 
an  ultimate  fact,  within  which  fall  both  the  self  and  the 
world  of  nature  by  which  in  our  daily  outlook  the  self  is 
confronted.  Analysis  reveals  both  of  these  as  simply  forms 
in  which  knowledge  is  self-presented,  and  in  which  it  is 
before  itself.  To  know  means  more  than  to  look  out 
through  a  window  at  some  reality  of  a  different  character. 
For  to  be  independent  and  actual  has  no  significance 
outside  the  form  in  which  things  appear  as  we  apprehend 
them  in  even  the  knowledge  that  is  finite. 

On  the  other  hand,  our  minds  are  just  as  little  centres 
of  activity  creative  of  objects  apart  from  them  in  time  and 
space.  The  mind  and  its  objects  are  both  actual,  and  as 
they  appear  for  us  they  are  correlative  and  co-ordinate. 
But  they  not  the  less  fall  within  the  entirety,  in  which  they 
have  their  ultimate  foundation.  Within  this  whole  they 
are  distinguished,  and  the  distinction  is  itself  a  creature 
of  reflection.  For  it  seems  to  have  no  meaning  that  is 
intelligible  on  any  other  footing.  Cogito,  sum.  In  knowing 
we  are,  and  the  objects  distinguished  from  us  and  from 
each  other  also  are.  In  each  case  the  meaning  and  the 
reality  are  inseparable  and  have  the  same  character. 

Within  the  entirety  nothing  has  significance  excepting 
what  the  activity  of  thought  gives  to  it.  To  have  no 
meaning  and  not  to  exist  appear  to  be  the  same  thing. 
The  activity  of  thought  is  thus  the  source  of  what  we  call 
reality.  It  establishes  what  are  conventionally  termed 
entities,  but  are  really  the  outcome  of  standpoints. 
Modern  science,  as  we  have  seen,  indicates  this  conclusion 
as  definitely  as  does  metaphysics.  It  is  our  systems  of 
reference  and  the  categories  we  employ  in  directing  and 
concentrating  attention  that  give  birth  for  us  to  the 
varying  forms  which  truth  and  reality  assume.  Such 
truth  and  reality  have  their  foundation  in  these  forms. 
But  they  are  not  subjective  creations.  They  stand  for 
just  what  we  mean  when  we  speak  among  ourselves  of  the 
actual.  They  characterise  things  themselves  and  not 
only  our  thoughts  about  them,  and  events  are  real  in  and 
through  them.  But  truth  and  reality  are  relative, 
inasmuch  as  they  are  thus  the  outcome  of  cardinal  stand- 
points in  knowledge.  Along  with  each  of  such  par- 
ticular standpoints  there  are  always  others  that  have 
title  deeds  of  equal  validity.  It  is  only  relatively  that 


THEORY    AND    PRACTICE  423 

for  any  one  standpoint  a  title  can  be  asserted  for  its  result 
in  a  form  that  is  exclusive.  The  final  and  complete  truth 
cannot  be  less  than  a  systematic  whole  of  knowledge 
within  which  all  particular  and  partial  outlooks  have  their 
places  as  levels  or  degrees  in  knowledge.  It  is  therefore 
from  above  and  not  from  underneath,  from  what  is  concrete 
and  individual,  and  not  from  abstractions  only  derivative 
from  it,  that  we  must  seek  to  inquire,  if  we  would  strive 
to  realise  the  ideal  of  bringing  the  whole  under  a  final 
and  adequate  conception,  and  of  so  attaining  to  full  truth. 

All  this  presses  itself  on  us  as  the  outcome  of  the 
principle  discussed  in  these  pages,  a  principle  brought  to 
the  light  at  times  more  and  at  times  less  perfectly  in  both 
ancient  and  modern  thought.  Its  prominence  to-day  is 
perhaps  greatest  in  the  domain  of  science.  On  science  it 
is  conferring  a  new  and  extended  significance,  by  the 
introduction  of  the  conception  of  relativity  into  scientific 
method. 

For  practice  the  general  result,  if  it  be  true,  must  have 
a  bearing  resembling  what  it  possesses  for  theory.  Society 
consists  of  an  assemblage  of  individuals  whose  purposes 
show  the  correspondence  considered  in  the  chapter  on 
the  state.  But  these  individuals  differ  from  each  other 
in  the  details  of  both  purpose  and  outlook.  The  differences 
are  as  essential  for  the  life  of  society  as  is  the  identity  on 
which  correspondence  is  based.  It  is  well  that  this 
should  be  so.  Were  it  otherwise,  that  life  would  be  at  a 
dead  level  and  progress  would  not  exist.  Among  animals 
the  individuals  of  the  species  resemble  each  other  the 
more  the  lower  we  go.  Between  the  individual  bees 
belonging  to  a  hive  it  is  difficult  to  detect  any  divergence 
in  conduct,  and  in  a  less  degree  this  is  true  of  horses  and 
dogs.  But  in  mankind,  with  whom  the  power  of  free 
reflection  is  the  distinguishing  characteristic,  a  variety 
corresponding  to  the  presence  of  individual  freedom  of 
mind  is  obvious.  The  more  civilised  is  man  the  greater 
is  the  divergence  between  individual  characters.  We  see 
this  best  if  we  compare  the  activity  of  a  highly  intellectual 
nation  with  that  of  a  savage  people.  In  their  works  we 
know  them  as  they  are. 

Purpose  is  determined  by  conception,  and  conception  is 
therefore  of  commanding  importance.  Its  formation  needs 
stimulation  and  guidance,  and  it  is  the  function  of  the 


424  CONCLUDING  REFLECTIONS 

teacher  to  provide  this.  The  national  system  of  education 
is  thus  neither  an  accident  nor  a  luxury.  It  is  a  necessity, 
and  it  is  increasingly  recognised  to  be  such  as  a  nation 
grows  in  stature. 

But  such  education  is  not  only  of  one  type,  nor  does  it 
proceed  from  any  single  source.  Its  genesis  is  the  desire 
of  freedom  in  thought  and  action,  freedom  in  which  man 
is  indeed  hampered  by  the  physical  structure  that  is  the 
organ  in  which  mind  expresses  itself,  but  is  in  respect  of 
his  brain  power  far  less  restricted  than  are  the  lower 
animals.  These  we  can  train  only  in  a  comparatively 
small  degree,  but  man  we  can  educate  without  any  definite 
limit  because  of  the  range  of  his  reflective  capacity.  To 
the  might  of  thought  no  secret  of  the  universe  is  wholly 
impenetrable,  man's  station  in  nature  and  the  restricted 
range  of  his  organs  notwithstanding.  For  thought  is  akin 
in  character  to  the  objects  it  thinks,  and,  as  the  result 
of  the  correspondence  of  reality  with  knowledge,  mind 
recognises  no  barrier  as  absolute. 

We  learn,  therefore,  in  ways  the  variety  of  which  is  as 
great  as  the  variety  of  our  souls,  and  we  draw  the  life- 
giving  water  of  knowledge  from  an  infinity  of  wells.  For 
one  it  comes  in  the  shape  of  increasing  aptitude  for  action 
and  success  in  dominating  his  environment.  To  another 
it  comes  in  power  gained  by  solitary  reflection.  To  a 
different  type  of  mind  it  arrives  as  success  in 'social  rela- 
tions. But  whether  it  be  in  the  field,  or  in  the  study,  or 
in  the  meeting-place,  what  is  attained  in  the  end  comes 
through  some  sort  of  knowledge.  This  may  have  the 
shape  of  fresh  ideas  of  a  general  type,  selected  and  arranged 
for  application,  or  it  may  take  the  shape  of  that  semi- 
instinctive  aptitude  for  which  the  name  experience  is 
sometimes  appropriated,  a  kind  of  experience  which  is  the 
outcome  of  the  correction  of  error  by  trial,  and  is  largely 
a  result  of  developed  disposition,  inborn  or  acquired. 

Though  men  and  women  are  endowed  by  nature  un- 
equally, and  always  depend  to  some  extent  for  the  chances 
of  their  minds  as  much  as  of  their  bodies  on  the  accident 
of  circumstances,  in  the  individual  cases  of  the  majority 
there  is  always  much  service  that  can  be  rendered  by 
others.  The  mind  is  self -developing,  but  its  power  of  self- 
development  comes  to  it  through  its  objects  and  ideas. 
In  its  freedom  to  select  these  it  needs  guidance,  intellectual, 


DEMOCRACY  AND  THE  HIGHER  LEADERSHIP    425 

social,  and  spiritual.  To  give  such  guidance  is  the  work 
of  the  leader  who  can  teach. 

But  the  blind  cannot  lead  the  blind  aright,  and  the 
teachers  must  have  their  eyes  open  and  see  as  much  as  is 
practicable  of  the  paths  along  which  they  are  to  lead. 
There  is  required,  accordingly,  for  the  guidance  of  the 
teachers  themselves,  higher  leadership  of  the  kind  which 
can  stimulate  towards  reliable  ideals  in  science,  in  art,  in 
religion,  and  in  philosophy.  For  the  relativity  of  their 
outlooks  has  to  be  realised  by  all  engaged  in  branches  of 
knowledge  with  which  other  branches  may  have  to  be 
brought  into  relation.  It  is  here  that  the  principle  of 
relativity  has  its  greatest  application.  It  shows  that 
truth  is  of  different  varieties  in  the  different  orders  of 
knowledge.  It  insists,  as  the  consequence,  that  toleration 
is  not  only  expedient  but  necessary.  It  is  not  by  restrain- 
ing freedom  of  thought,  or  even  freedom  of  action,  further 
than  restraint  on  freedom  of  action  is  required  in  the 
interest  of  the  just  liberties  of  others,  that  the  highest 
level  of  well-being  is  to  be  reached.  It  is  by  that  enlarge- 
ment of  the  individual  spirit  and  its  outlook  which  lets 
us  see  how  much  we  must  know  before  we  can  be  sure 
that  we  know  at  all. 

Democracy,  that  is  to  say,  the  rule  of  those  who  have 
been  selected  to  be  directly  responsible  to  the  citizens  as 
a  whole  and  to  conform  to  the  general  will  of  the  nation, 
in  the  sense  in  which  that  will  was  interpreted  in  the 
chapter  on  the  state,  is  at  present  tending  to  become  a 
fact  all  the  world  over.  We  have,  therefore,  to  consider 
more  than  ever  before  how  to  implant  in  the  mind  of  the 
people  the  inclination  to  call  for  the  development  of 
intelligent  interest  and  of  the  individuality  that  is  of  its 
essence.  I  need  hardly  say  again  that  mind  I  take  to 
include  not  less  what  is  spiritual  than  what  is  interpreted 
through  reflective  capacity  only.  We  have  to  teach  our 
people,  if  we  would  maintain  the  great  station  of  our 
own  country  among  the  other  nations  of  the  earth,  that 
they  must  see  things  steadily  and  see  them  whole.  If  we 
are  to  do  this  we  must  make  sure  that  our  statesmen,  our 
local  leaders,  our  teachers  and  our  preachers,  have  them- 
selves something  of  the  mind  that  is  really  synoptic, 
and  are  in  some  degree  fitted  to  speak  of  eternity  as  well 
as  of  time. 


426  CONCLUDING   REFLECTIONS 

In  certain  respects  the  attainment  of  such  a  result  cannot 
but  depend  on  a  general  outlook  which  must  in  the  end 
rest  on  what  our  best  thinkers  can  provide  for  us.  If  the 
principle  of  relativity  in  its  broadest  sense  be  a  true  one 
it  is  capable  of  furnishing  a  lesson  for  general  practice 
which  may  help  to  guide  our  thinkers  in  their  work,  work 
which  must  be  shaped  by  objectives  of  high  quality, 
which  they  can  in  common  set  before  themselves.  In  the 
past  we  have  been  distracted,  probably  unnecessarily,  by 
differences  and  controversies  on  questions  of  minor 
importance.  To-day  the  state  of  the  world  after  a  great 
war  suggests  at  least  the  possibility  of  a  better  state  of 
things,  in  which  men  and  women  may,  throughout  their 
inevitable  differences,  be  in  agreement  about  some  things 
that  are  in  common  needful.  For  their  insistent  ques- 
tionings show  them  to  have  been  stirred  at  last  by  a  great 
convulsion  of  soul,  and  to  be  serious  as  they  were  not 
before  war  broke  upon  them. 

It  is  this  seriousness  of  mind  that  those  who  are 
well-to-do  have  to  encourage  by  their  example.  I  need 
hardly  say  that  I  do  not  mean  that  there  is  no  room  for 
lightness  of  touch.  But  I  think  that  we  are  deficient 
in  attention  to  concentration  of  high  purpose.  It  is  true 
that  temperament  varies  in  localities,  and  gives  rise  to 
provincial  variations  that  are  largely  the  results  of 
tradition,  and  sometimes  to  dispositions  that  have  grown 
under  the  soporific  influence  of  surroundings.  These  are 
everywhere  apparent.  Yet  such  is  the  variety  of  the 
possible  ways  in  which  human  beings  can  excel  that 
there  is  room  in  our  society  for  every  sort  of  activity. 
"  Die  Zeit,"  as  Goethe  used  to  say,  "  1st  unendlich  lang !  " 
We  are  most  of  us  capable  of  almost  unlimited  application 
if  we  choose  to  make  use  of  our  particular  opportunities. 
But,  then,  art  also  is  long,  and  life  after  all  has  an  end. 
What  we  have  to  dread  is,  not  so  much  contrast  between 
the  forms  of  possible  activity,  as  inertness.  Self-directed 
activity  is  essential  to  success  in  every  shape,  and  energy 
can  only  be  properly  applied  if  it  is  inspired  by  sustained 
purpose. 

The  reflective  habit  is  thus  highly  desirable  in  the 
interests  of  our  democracy.  How  much  misery,  through 
strikes  and  lock-outs  and  unrest,  would  not  have  been 
averted  had  there  been  enough  of  reflection !  The 


BURKE    ON    MANKIND  427 

necessity  for  reflection  is  not  only  on  one  side.  If  the  work- 
man does  not  always  reflect  neither  does  the  employer. 
The  want  of  a  broad  outlook  on  the  relations  of  labour  to 
capital  has  produced  and  is  producing  intensification  of 
an  undesirable  sense  of  difference  in  advantages.  To  the 
narrowness  of  the  existing  outlook  as  it  appears  to  the 
working  classes  we  are  only  beginning  to  become  alive, 
and  we  still  dwell  on  the  evils  of  class  conflicts  as  though 
the  responsibility  for  them  were  mainly  on  one  side. 

It  is  true  that,  as  Burke  said  long  ago,  "  the  nature  of 
man  is  intricate  ;  the  objects  of  society  are  of  the  greatest 
possible  complexity ;  and  therefore  no  simple  disposition 
or  direction  of  power  can  be  suitable  either  to  man's  nature 
or  to  the  quality  of  his  affairs."  He  said  this,  with  his 
genius  for  conveying  a  general  principle  pictorially,  with 
reference  to  the  affairs  of  his  own  period.  But  his  words 
are  not  the  less  profoundly  applicable  to  the  labour 
question  as  it  is  with  us  to-day.  It  is  no  easy  problem  to 
devise  in  this  connection  a  means  by  which  ends,  the 
accomplishment  of  all  of  which  is  essential  in  the  interest 
of  the  nation,  can  be  rapidly  attained.  No  principle 
abstractly  applied  will  solve  the  difficulties  that  press  on 
us.  As  Burke  says  elsewhere,  "  no  rational  man  ever  did 
govern  himself  by  abstractions  and  universals."  Again, 
in  another  connection,  he  has  a  pregnant  utterance,  equally 
of  a  general  application.  "  The  question  with  me  is  not 
whether  you  have  a  right  to  render  your  people  miserable, 
but  whether  it  is  not  your  interest  to  make  them  happy. 
The  manners  and  principles  of  those  who  lead,  not  of  those 
who  are  governed  .  .  .  will  ever  determine  the  strength  or 
weakness  and  therefore  the  continuance  or  dissolution  of 
a  state."  Reminders  such  as  these  ought  never  to  be  out 
of  memory  in  our  attempts  at  dealing  with  the  social 
problem  that  promises  to  press  itself  most  on  us  in  the 
near  future,  that  of  the  industrial  life  of  this  nation.  It 
will  be  our  own  responsibility  if  the  appearance  of  things 
becomes  yet  more  menacing.  For  our  democracy  is  not 
naturally  revolutionary.  It  is  in  truth  miscellaneous  in  its 
composition  and  conservative  in  its  tone.  There  need 
be  no  fear  if  we  are  careful  in  time,  and  do  not  by  our 
neglect  allow  sparks  to  kindle  into  flames.  What  we  all 
require,  in  every  class  of  society,  is  the  wider  outlook  from 
which  is  visible  the  danger,  together  with  what  is  necessary 


428  CONCLUDING  REFLECTIONS 

to  avert  it.  We  have  to  educate  those  who  by  their 
numbers  are  our  masters  when  the  ballot  takes  place,  and 
we  have  also  to  educate  ourselves.  Not  wholly  without 
reason  are  the  working  classes  bidding  their  would-be 
physicians  to  heal  themselves.  It  is  not  good  for  any  of 
us  that  there  should  exist  the  gaps  in  mental  life  that 
exist  to-day.  Out  of  these  gaps  arise  discontent  and  unrest. 
The  world  is  a  better  world  than  it  once  was.  Slavery 
is  gone,  and  Christianity  has  established  the  infinite  worth 
of  the  individual  and  the  value  for  eternity  of  the  humblest 
soul.  There  has  been  progress  in  many  directions.  It  is 
progress  that  is  so  far  not  accepted  as  being  sufficient. 
That  is  hardly  in  itself  a  cause  for  anxiety.  It  is  of  the 
nature  of  mind  never  to  be  quiescent,  and  in  its  dialectic 
it  is  ever  passing  from  one  outlook  to  another  that  is 
different.  The  mind  of  a  people  is  in  this  respect  like  the 
mind  of  the  individual  man.  No  political  faith  can 
remain  static  and  live.  The  life  of  such  faith  lies  in  its 
development.  It  is  a  mistake  to  look  back  to  a  period  that 
has  passed  and  to  point  to  the  tone  and  temper  of  its 
leaders  as  having  been  mistaken,  merely  because  we 
observe  some  apparent  narrowness.  The  tone  and  temper 
may  not  have  been  narrow  as  estimated  by  reference  to 
the  purposes  required  by  the  period.  We  needed  the  free 
trade  movement  in  this  country  at  the  time  when  it  came. 
Most  of  us  do  not  in  the  least  desire  to  go  back  on  what 
that  movement  accomplished,  or  to  question  the  great  and 
new  service  it  rendered  in  its  period.  But  we  say  that  here 
too  relativity  comes  in,  and  that  what  was  then  indeed 
wisdom  was  yet  only  its  beginning  and  not  its  end.  To-day 
the  problem  of  the  production  and  distribution  of  the 
fruits  of  industry  assumes  a  new  and  different  form.  That 
does  not  show  that  the  great  principle  of  a  past  generation 
was  in  that  generation  wrong  or  that  it  is  wrong  now.  It 
only  proves  that  its  truth,  while  truth  according  to  the 
standards  of  the  time,  and  perhaps  still  truth  for  our  time 
also,  is  not  enough  to  cover  the  field  of  the  outlook  in  the 
days  in  which  we  live.  There  is  a  new  demand  in  our 
period  for  interference  with  individual  liberty  in  the 
interests  of  society  as  a  whole.  It  may  or  may  not  be 
justified.  But  in  any  case  the  question  is  one  that  must 
be  answered  from  a  further  system  of  reference,  and  to 
which  the  answer  may  prove  an  answer  which  we  are 


THE    GENERAL   LESSON  429 

bound  to  accept  as  admissible  where  our  forefathers  would 
have  rejected  it.  The  mind  of  the  state  never  stands 
still,  any  more  than  does  the  mind  of  the  individual. 
We  have  therefore  not  only  to  watch  but  to  think,  and  to 
take  heed  lest  our  social  organism  gets  encrusted  with  the 
products  of  an  environment  that  is  no  longer  suited  to  it. 

I  have  made  this  reference  to  the  public  life  of  nations 
because  it  is  germane  to  the  principal  subject  under  dis- 
cussion. The  opinions,  collective  as  well  as  individual,  of 
mankind  are  profoundly  dependent  on  relativity  in  outlook. 
Such  relativity  is  a  secondary  consequence  of  the  deeper- 
lying  relativity  of  knowledge  in  its  general  character,  and 
in  practical  life  is  not  dissimilar  in  the  fashion  of  its 
working  out.  But  an  element  of  subjectivity,  an  influence 
due  to  individual  personality,  always  enters  into  what  we 
call  opinion  to  distinguish  it  from  full  knowledge.  The 
two  are  related  by  the  fact  that  in  each  reference  to  some 
standard  is  the  condition  of  truth.  But  in  the  case  of 
the  knowledge  that  is  the  medium  within  which  alone 
experience  of  any  kind  can  really  emerge,  the  principle 
applies  in  a  fashion  that  goes  to  the  very  roots  of  reality. 
It  is  the  same  current,  but  when  we  turn  to  relativity  in 
the  details  of  human  intercourse  we  find  that  the  current 
has  overflowed  its  banks  and  become  spread  out  so  much 
that  its  channels  are  no  longer  clearly  marked.  It  has  lost 
its  definite  appearance  as  the  main  stream. 

The  survey  endeavoured  in  this  volume  now  approaches 
its  conclusion.  There  is  a  final  question  which  the  reader 
may  ask,  since  the  end  is  in  sight.  Assuming  the  principle 
of  relativity  to  mean  all  that  has  been  said,  what  guidance 
does  it  offer  for  the  conduct  of  our  individual  lives  ?  I 
do  not  think  that  the  question  is  a  difficult  one  to  answer. 
The  real  lesson  which  the  principle  of  the  relativity  of 
knowledge  teaches  us  is  always  to  remember  that  there 
are  different  orders  in  which  both  our  knowledge  and  the 
reality  it  seeks  have  differing  forms.  These  orders  we 
must  be  careful  to  distinguish  and  not  to  confuse.  We 
must  keep  ourselves  aware  that  truth  in  terms  of  one 
order  may  not  necessarily  be  a  sufficient  guide  in  the 
search  for  truth  in  another  one.  We  have,  in  other  words, 
to  be  critical  of  our  categories.  As  an  aid  to  our  practice, 
the  principle  points  us  in  a  direction  where  we  may  possess 
our  souls  with  tranquillity  and  courage.  We  stand 
29 


430  CONCLUDING  REFLECTIONS 

warned  against  "  other- worldliness  "  in  a  multitude  of  con- 
cealed forms.  We  are  protected,  too,  if  the  doctrine  be 
well-founded,  against  certain  spectres  which  obtrude  them- 
selves in  the  pilgrim's  path.  Materialism,  scepticism,  and 
obscurantism  alike  vanish.  The  real  is  there,  but  it  is 
akin  in  its  nature  to  our  own  minds,  and  it  is  not  terrifying. 
Death  loses  much  of  its  sting  and  the  grave  of  its  victory. 
For  we  have  not  only  the  freedom  that  is  of  the  essence 
of  mind,  but  we  are  encouraged  to  abstract  and  withdraw 
ourselves  from  the  apparent  overwhelmingness  of  pain  and 
even  of  death  itself.  Such  things  cease  to  be  of  the  old 
importance  when  they  lose  the  appearance  of  final  reality. 
There  may  come  to  us,  too,  contentment  of  spirit,  and 
a  peace  which  passes  our  everyday  understanding.  We 
grow  in  tolerance,  for  we  see  that  it  is  in  expression  rather 
than  in  intention  that  our  fellow-men  are  narrow.  We 
realise  that  we  are  all  of  us  more,  even  in  moments  of  deep 
depression,  than  we  appear  to  ourselves  to  be,  and  that 
humanity  extends  beyond  the  limits  that  are  assigned 
even  by  itself  to  itself.  Our  disposition  to  be  gentle 
to  those  who  may  seem  to  misinterpret  us  because 
of  dissent  from  our  outlook  on  life  grows  with  the 
recognition  that,  as  Spinoza  wrote  two  hundred  and  fifty 
years  ago,  in  his  answer  to  the  letter  offering  him  refuge 
in  a  chair  at  Heidelberg  from  his  theological  persecutors, 
"  religious  dissensions  arise  not  so  much  from  the  ardour 
of  men's  zeal  for  religion  itself,  as  from  their  various  dis- 
positions and  love  of  contradiction,  which  leads  them  into 
a  habit  of  decrying  and  condemning  everything,  however 
justly  it  be  said."  Of  Spinoza  himself  Renan  has  without 
exaggeration  spoken  as  "  1'homme  qui  eut  a  son  heure  la 
plus  haute  conscience  du  divin."  His  life  and  his  attitude 
of  soul  remain  a  lesson  of  high  value  for  those  who  seek 
to  believe  as  he  did,  Est  Deus  in  nobis.  Words  like  these 
do  not  call  for  the  recognition  of  what  is  supernatural. 
They  relate  to  what  is  in  final  truth  natural,  and  all  they 
claim  at  our  hands  is  the  recognition  that  what  is  natural 
falls  within  differing  orders  of  reflection,  all  of  which  are 
found  to  be  in  ultimate  harmony.  It  is  this  that  seems 
to  have  been  in  substance  the  creed,  varying  in  expression 
but  ever  indicative  of  a  common  faith,  proclaimed  by 
some  of  the  greatest  guides  of  mankind  in  ancient  and 
in  modern  times.  It  is  a  creed  that  if  it  be  true  helps 


THE  END  481 

those  who  can  make  it  their  own  to  dispel  obscurities, 
and  to  lighten  for  themselves  and  for  others  the  burden 
and  the  apparent  mystery  of  human  life.  It  is  a  creed 
that  stimulates  the  practice  of  unselfishness  in  social  and 
religious  life,  interpreted  as  fully  harmonising  with  the 
dictates  of  philosophical  thought.  "  If  any  man  shall  do 
His  will,  he  shall  know  of  the  doctrine." 


INDEX 


Absolute,  an,  387,  390 

Action  at  a  distance,  93,  134 

Active  reason,  250 

Alexander,  Professor,  273  et  seq. 

American  bankers,  414 

American  philosophy,  313 

Aristotle,  8,  243  et  seq.,  262,  345, 

347,  348 
Arithmetic,  281 
Arnold,  Matthew,   8 
Art,  4,  11,  12,  13,  244,  411 
Assumptions,  unconscious,  17 
Astronomer  Royal,  the,  52 

Bacon,  Francis,  14,  36,  253,  372 
Bergson,    66,    91,    118,    265,    271, 

ZlQetseq.,  317,  333,  337,  359 
Berkeley,  Bishop,  9, 21, 30, 130, 268, 

293 
Berlin    engineer,    an,    on    Energy 

and  Relativity,  57,  58 
Bifurcation  of  Nature,  theory  of,  17 
Biology,  10,  12,  124,  125,  126,  130, 

133,  284 

Bolland,  Professor,  255 
Bosanquet,    Professor,    201,     206, 

207,  211,  212,  214,  326,  331,  340 
Bosanquet,  Mrs.,  408 
Bradley,  F.  H.,  201,  206,  207  etseq., 

214,  256,  315,  340,  417 
British    Astronomical    Expedition 

of  1919,  52 
Bronte,  Emily,  406 
Browning,  Robert,  404 
Burke,  Edmund,  427 

Caesar,  420 

Caird,  Edward,  246,  255 

Carr,  Professor  Wildon,  130,  317 

Categories,  272 

Cause,  125,  135 

Centrifugal  force,  121 

Chemistry,  142 

Christianity,  3,  8,  428 

Cogredience,  78 


Coincidence,  99,  101 
Common  Sensibles,  the,  251 
Compresence,  269 
Congruence,  77,  79,  80 
Cook,  Eliza,  11 

Cunningham,  Professor  Watts,  313 
et  seq.,  320,  323 

Dante,  11,  347 

Darwin,  Charles,  228 

Death,  226,  409 

Degrees  in  knowledge  and  reality, 

180,  199 
Deism,  386 
Democracy,  4,  425 
Dialectic,  235 

Eclipse  of  1919,  the,  52 
Eddington,  Professor,  81,  96,   100, 

105,  109,  123,  124,  128 
Einstein,  33,  34,  39,  43,  45,  51,  52, 

55,  56,  58,  82  et  seq.,  95,  96,  103, 

106,  107,   114,   121,   123,   129, 
132,  139,  140,  191,  275,  276 

End,  135 

Erdmann,  Professor  J.  E.,  255 
Euclidean  space,  107 
Extensive  abstraction,  method  of 
71 

Faith,  5 

Faust,  362  et  seq. 

Finite  centres  of  knowledge,  141, 

156,  178,  195 
France,  R.  N.,  305 
Freundlich,  62,  110 

Galileo,  130 

Gauss,  59,  97,  118 

Generality,  49 

Geodesic  line,  95 

Goethe,  11,  187,  231,  335,  343,  365, 

391,  399,  426 
Good  form,  356 
Gottingen,  118 


432 


INDEX 


433 


Gravitation,  93 
Greeks,  the,  14 
Green,  T.  H.,  318,  340 

Hamilton,  Sir  William,  35,  110 
Hegel,  60,  225,  261,  327,  332,  334 

et  seq.,  375,  391 
Heredity,  134 
Holmes,  Mr.  Justice,  284 
Homer,  11 
Hume,  David,  9,  21,  268,  293,  301 

Idealism,  subjective,  9 

Identity,  personal,   155,   159,   160, 

163 

Inertia,  93 
Inge,  Dr.,  257 
"  It,"  the,  27,  30 

Jena,  343 

Jesus,  393,  420 

John  the  Baptist,  187 

Johnson,  Dr.,  30 

Julian,  the  Emperor,  264 

Kant,  21,  22,  23.  26;  27,  33,  38,  60, 
65,  109,  130,  138,  139,  296  et 
seq.,  303,  311,333,  337 

Knowledge,  6,  29,  141,  144,  150, 
167 

Law,  355 

Leadership,  the  Higher,  425 
League  of  Nations,  378 
Leibnitz,  11,  33,  130,  157,  416 
Life,  nature  of,  93,  127,  134,  160, 

165 

Light,  velocity  of,  45,  82,  83,  91 
Literature,  4 

Locke,  John,  20,  21,  292  et  seq. 
Lord  Chancellor,  a  Victorian,  18 
Lucretius,  263 

Mackenna,  Stephen,  257 

Mathematics,  16,  39,  40,  48,  53,  179 

Matter,  222 

Maxwell,  Clerk,  71 

Meaning,  21,  168,  179 

Measurement,  14 

Meres jowski,  264 

Metaphors,  225 

Mind,  127,  132,  136,  160,  172,  175, 

290 

Minkowski,  94,  101,  120,  191 
Moltke,  336 


Monads,  158 
Morality,  354 
Mysticism,  231 

Napoleon,  187,  343 

Nation,  nature  of  a,  375 

Nature,  17,  20 

Nelson,  420 

New  Realism,  66,137,243,  265 etaeq. 

Number,  279 

Orders  in  reflection,  32 
Organism,  the  living,  31 

Paley,  373 
Parallelism,  73 
Parliament,  370 
Particular,  47,  48 
Pathway  to  Reality,  preface 
Perception,  representative,  35,  110 
Perpendicularity,  79 
Personality,  227 
Philosophy,  history  of,  8,  9 
Physicists,  what  they  really  observe, 

47,  93 

Planck,  Max,  61,  111,  305 
Plato,  8,  137,  244,  245,  348 
Plotinus,  8,  243,  257  et  seq.,  262 
Poetry,  10 
Political  opinion,  4 
Politics,  3 
Porphyry,  260 
Pragmatism,  143 
Pringle-Pattison,     Professor,     206, 

212,213,  214 

Progress,  10  ;    in  philosophy,  271 
Protagoras,  37 
Prussian  Constitution,  334,  346 

Quanta  theory,  111 

Realism  and  Idealism,  their  con- 
vergence, 239 
Reformer,  task  of  the,  6 
Reid,  Thomas,  268,  295 
Relativity,  various  meanings  of,  34 
Religion,  3,  393,  412,  413 
Renaissance,  8 
Renan,  375,  430 
Riemann,  59,  80,  110,  120 
Rossetti,  Christina,  412 
Rotation,  121 
Russell,  Bertrand,  63,  277  et  seq. 

Sabine,  Professor,  321 
Scepticism,  21 

Schlick,  Professor,  59,  100,  110 
Schopenhauer,  303  et  seq.,  333,  337 


434 


INDEX 


Science,  16  et  seq. 

Self,  29,  149  et  seq.,  152,  169,  171 

Sellien,  Ewald,  60,  62 

Shakespeare,  11 

Shortest  path,  98 

Simultaneity,  105 

Sittlichkeit,  378 

Sovereignty,  370,  377,  385 

Space,  94 

Space  and  Time,  relativity  of  their 

reality,  83 

Space-time  continuum,  73 
Spinoza,  430 

Spiritualism,  3,  407,  410 
State,  the,  377,  379,  381 
Strauss,  David,  3 
Symbols,  16,  17 

Teleology,  327 
Tensors,  100  et  seq. 
Terminology,  metaphysical,  179 


Time,  94,  153,  230,  327,  329 
Truth,  10,  11,  12,  13,  14,  15,  132 
Tyndall,  263 

Universe,  whether  finite,   122 

Value,  10,  15,  351,  353,  361 
Victorians,  the,  17,  18,  19,  64 

Wallace,  Professor,  340 
War,  the  Great,  3,  5 
Whitehead,   Professor,    17,   39,   63 
et  seq.,  105,  112  etseq.,  123, 125 
Whittaker,  Thomas,  257,  259 
Will,  the,  307,  353 
Will,  the  general,  353,  367 
Wordsworth,  11,  397,  398 
World-line,  94,  101 

Zeller,  246,  248,  265 
Zelter,  336,  363 


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